Iravin Nizhal movie review: Parthiban’s film is quirky, but feels familiar

Iravin Nizhal is not just a single-shot movie. It also feels like Parthiban has tried to narrate it in a single breath just like Guna. The movie flows non-stop from one scene to the other seemingly without a pause for reflection. This film tells the story of a tormented soul. And Parthiban covers a lot of ground with the plot as he assimilates the elements of social commentary and morality tale into an amorphous narration.

Nandu (Parthiban) is a hard boiled protagonist. At a very young age, he loses his innocence. His mother was murdered by his alcoholic father, who goes to jail and makes him an orphan. His foster family begins to mistreat him with the arrival of their biological child. He’s left to wander on the streets, learning ways to survive the cold winds and cold-hearted men. He gets raped, and physically assaulted and experiences everything that a boy of his age shouldn’t. And the brutal treatment meted out by society turns him into an amoral man. But, just when he reaches the top of the food chain and he’s no longer the prey but a predator, life throws a curve ball. He becomes a father of a baby girl and that event forces him to get in touch with his comatose conscience, which in turn makes his life a living hell.

The driving emotion of Iravin Nizhal is one man’s unresolved women problems. Nandu is a man who seemingly struggles to make sense of women or their role in his life. It is his frustration, anger and regrets with the opposite gender that drives his every action. For him, his biggest regrets and his only redemption, all come in the form of females. A theme that Parthiban keeps visiting over and over again in his movies.

His performance in Iravin Nizhal reminds us of his other films like Kudaikul Mazhai (2004) and his last directorial outing Oththa Seruppu Size 7. All these films have a protagonist, who’s driven to the edge of insanity by heart-breaks caused by the women in his life.

Parthiban has also tried to whip up shock by showing some tragic imagery, which usually doesn’t find a place in mainstream movies. He also has many R-rated pun-filled dialogues that suggest the filmmaker’s effort to shed the inhibition to say things that normally Tamil filmmakers won’t say in movies.

And he also does something else with Iravin Nizhal. Before he begins the actual film, he shows a video of the efforts that went into the making of what he calls the world’s first “non-linear single shot movie”. He knew that people may not appreciate this film if they weren’t aware of what he was trying to accomplish. The main challenge of making this film was to achieve the status of a single-shot movie. He had to shoot the whole 90-minute film without pausing the camera. So a single misstep or a lighting issue would need him to reshoot everything he did from the top once more. So the makers took around 22 takes before they got it right. There was even one instance where a mistake happened at the last minute and forced the makers to scrap the whole 90 minutes of the movie and re-shoot it again. Arguably, for the first time, before the actual movie, comes the interval break. These are the little quirky things the audience allows Parthiban to pull off.

Parthiban has a reputation to keep. He is expected to do something different every time he makes a movie. And so he keeps inventing new ways to tell a story. But, it seems he isn’t changing the story much. He is just changing the way he tells it.