Iravin Nizhal Movie Review - Kudos to all hard work and efforts invested
If there is one thing about a parthiban movie you can always count on, it is that it will never be a careless, lazy attempt. In reality, his movies are characterised by having too many ideas. His films are exciting because of his ongoing endeavour to provide his viewers with novel experiences (and slightly dread, because his failed experiments, like Koditta Idangalai Nirappuga, have that what-was-he-even-smoking quality).
Like the best of Parthiban's movies, Iravin Nizhal isn't a movie you can ever criticise for lacking effort. By showing a making-of feature before the main movie, the director actually forces us to observe this effort. The movie bills itself as "the first single-shot non-linear film in history," and in this nearly 30-minute feature, we witness the 96-minute continuous shot that represents the film's entire making.
Moving on, the movie begins with Nandu (Parthiban), a financier of motion pictures, being informed that the police are about to arrest him. He then flees with a gun in hand, hoping to use it on Patamananda (Robo Shankar), a fake godman who is one of the people who have him in this precarious situation. He narrates his colourful life, the people who drove him into darkness, his sins, and the one glimmer of light that is still present in it as he waits for his target in a crumbling ashram.
Iravin Nizhal is an all-too-familiar story about a person's rise and fall in terms of content. We observe how a child who was abandoned at birth is moulded by social pressures, pushed into a world of crime to survive, how love rescues him from it, and how he is again dragged back into the never-ending abyss of darkness. We observe how the women who enter his life, lakshmi (Sneha Kumar), Premakumari (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar), Parvathi (Sai priyanka Ruth), and Chilakamma (Brigida Saga), both positively and negatively influence it. We encounter Parthibanisms (there is even a nod to his first film Pudhiya Paadhai). Overall, it is essentially old wine in a new, oddly constructed bottle.
There are countless instances where you are left in awe of how seamlessly the scenes change from one era to another. In addition, parthiban skillfully employs sound effects and music (AR Rahman's rousing score, which is like a ray of light in this film's dark universe) to make us forget that the entire movie was shot inside the massive set that we see in the making-of video. In that regard, this "enterprise" is unquestionably a success because parthiban accomplishes his goals.