NYIFF-G5A Film Festival Reviews, U Turn: Highway is my way

In many ways, the choice of U Turn as the penultimate screening of the NYIFF-G5A Film Society’s Film Festival, the first ever Mumbai edition of the annual event, held 7,793.27 miles/12,560 km/16 hours flying time away, was a U Turn, compared to the kind of films they had been showing for the four preceding weeks. Symbolically, the idea of the festival is itself a U Turn, since all the films are Indian, sourced from NYIFF. Coal to Newcastle-upon-Tyne? So what? At least I am not complaining. Almost all the films are ones that I had not seen, and the quality they proffered was more than serviceable. The only time we hit a road block was with the Kannada film U Turn (English sub-titles), which just about managed to avoid potholes and kept driving along uncharted territory, using a self-devised GPS navigator.

A reporter, Rachana (Shraddha Srinath), interning with the New Indian Express, Bengaluru, has a crush on the crime reporter Aditya (Dilip Raj), whose help she seeks for research material on accidents on a flyover. For a ‘fee’, a hobo who dwells on the edges of the road, notes down the vehicle numbers of transgressors, who move divider stones and take the U-turn, and gives them to Rachana every day. She obtains further the details of such culprits, using her contact in the traffic department, with the intention of confronting them for their illegal, hazardous "short-cut", and thereby making a news story.

Unintentionally, Rachana gets entangled in a murder case. Even as she is questioned by the cops, things get only worse, and what began as a one-off, composite article, now finds her being framed for the very cases that she is investigating. In an uncanny sequence of events, all drivers end up dead, within hours of their U Turn, with no indications of foul-play, and suicide presumed. Rachana is the prime accused, because she is the only common link, and has been recorded visiting one of them. Enter a Sub-Inspector, Nayak (Roger Narayan), who believes her, and wants to help her find the truth.

Writer-director Pawan Kumar made his debut in Kannada films in 2011, with Lifeu Ishtene, which was a box office success. He chose to take the route of crowd-funding for his next project, Lucia, which has become a kind of cult film. U Turn is made with the money invested by some 65 individuals, forming Pawan Kumar Studios, and all these share-holders have been designated Honorary Producers in the credits. That’s a first. It was nominated for the best screenplay at NYIFF, and maybe deservedly so. Kumar shows remarkable merit in weaving disparate elements into a dimensionally whole fabric. Most parts, however, remain separated from the others.

An appealing, slice-of-life beginning gets you smiling, even chuckling. It has no bearing at all on the rest of the film. Long parallel cutting soon follows, which is exciting in itself, but builds up to nothing. After choosing an apparently trivial but definitely ethic/civic issue, he then proceeds to turn the plot into a murder mystery, replete with red herrings and whodunit tropes, and in the biggest jolt to the viewer, brings in the super-natural, in present-day, dream and flash-forward formats. One would expect that ghosts on a revenge-spree would know who did what, not target innocents, before they unleash their, but not so in this case. U Turn is a very complex film, though writer-director Pawan Kumar would like to believe otherwise.

There are many shots that look awesome. Sit back and analyse, and then you feel you’ve been taken for granted. Though claimed to be based on real incidents, it fails that test by a wide margin. What’s more, even the New Indian Express ( a real daily published from Bengaluru, among other places) link, and even the paper clipping that flashes on the screen in the end, which could have validated the exercise, are all concocted. Noticing traffic offences and being concerned about the potential threats they pose o life and limb are laudable examples of civic consciousness, not a platform to launch a flight of fantasy. In U Turn, Form is formidable, content is contentious. Dazzling nothingness is still nothingness. (See excerpts from Pawan Kumar interviews below).*

Shraddha Srinath was seen in Kohinoor and is doing very special cameo in Mani Ratnam upcoming film, ‪‎KaatruVeliyidai. She is a law practitioner and theatre-buff, who quit job her job to get into films. One audition was not enough. A series of rounds of auditions were held. “My God, I was nervous, and Pawan's handycam was intimidating me so much.” She got it right in the end, and this is a promising beginning.

Roger Narayan (The Test, Hola! Venky, The Man Who Knew Infinity), is a multi-national, multi-lingual in the real sense. He speaks Kannada, English, Tamil and passable Hindi, having lived in Mumbai during his childhood. After moving around with his parents for years, he has settled in Los Angeles. That might need a correction, since he has spent 7 of his last twelve months in India. Besides acting (it began in the 1980s, when he was a little boy), he enjoys biking and ....flying planes!

He was there for the Q&A after the screening, on 19 July, and looked much taller in real-life than on screen (shoo shoo?). Also came across as a loquacious person, who likes maintaining good PR. After the quirky and satirical Hola! Venky, U Turn is a progression, and he would have had a role as substantial and complete as Shradhha’s, had Pawan not made a difficult editing decision. As it stands, it is an add-on kind of part, which is only partly convincing. For a stage actor, his voice is soft and almost fuzzy. Is he toning it down too much, to suit the medium?                                                                                                   

Radhika Chetan is cast as the ghost, Maya. A software professional-turned actor, she was cast after Pawan saw her in RangiTaranga. She handles both the warm house-wife and loving mother side and the murderous ghost incarnation with equal finesse. Support from Skanda

Krishna Hebbale, Pavan, Naveen, Divya, Pramod Shetty as Sundar, Aarna Kulkarni as Aarna,

Kennedy and Chethan D’Souza, as one of the drug addicts, are on par. Chethan and his co-actor have executed the fight choreography very well. The actor playing the Sr. Inspector is a familiar face. His role and portrayal, nevertheless, appear contrived.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/Kdh5P8dtMXA

Rating: ** ½

Pawan Kumar on U Turn, and related subjects

“U-Turn was written while I was working on the Nicotine script. Nicotine is a big film and we didn’t want to compromise on the quality for that script. So getting it together took a year and meanwhile I could start U-Turn with new people and shoot it immediately.

We created a production house called PKS (Pawan Kumar Studios) and in a way it is crowd-funded because there are 65 people who are share-holders. With Lucia and crowd-funding, it stopped after one movie. But with this we should be able to fund a series of films. After Lucia, many people contacted and said they wanted to fund Kannada films. These people are from all walks of life around the world and not connected to the film industry. The creative decisions are made by me and my team but I keep them posted on everything that is happening and take their suggestions. They are aware that the growth of the independent cinema industry is quite slow.

Nicotine could still get made if U-Turn does really well and makes money. I got excited about an idea involving the KH Double Road flyover (in Bengaluru). I think it was the second flyover built in Bengaluru, and it has its own history, over the last several years, where its orientation used to keep changing. For a long time, it became the only flyover in the world to have signal on top of it!

Some of the challenges that I took personally was to not make it complex like how Lucia was. I wanted the film to be linear in narrative. The topic has to do with traffic rules and how we behave in traffic and for it to be seen by as many people and understood we didn’t want to get into this complex narrative. It is still my way of making a film but anyone will be able to watch the film and take home something from it.

U-Turn happened in July when I used to drop my daughter Lucy to school and traffic used to be high. I used to park in front of her school for more than an hour and used the time to write the script."

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By the time you read this, the festival would have concluded, with the last screening being A Far Afternoon-A Painted Saga, the documentary on painter Krishen Khanna, by Sruti Harihara Subramaniam, on 21 July 2016.

I was there, and will write about that show too.