What Is Ulidavaru Kandante And Who Is Richie?!

Nivin Pauly’s stardom is moving from big to bigger and great to greater. He has chose an appropriate to make a proper Tamil debut. Nivin Pauly gained a huge fan following all around South India after the tremendous success of Premam. Debutante Gautham Ramachandran, who has assisted director Mysskin, is directing the Tamil film Richie. Richie is the remake of critically acclaimed Kannada film Ulidavaru Kandante. The director said that he and Nivin watched the original film in 2015 and decided to remake it and since then Gautham started working on the script to make the necessary changes for the Tamil audience. The director also said that he had almost made 40 drafts before getting the perfect script for the remake. The makers have recently released a teaser which created a storm on social media, it broke many YouTube records and the number of views is still adding. The teaser had featured only Nivin Pauly i.e the character Richie. His black shirt and beard reminded his fans of Premam and there were many memes appreciating the actor’s style. While most of the audience (the one’s who haven’t watched the Ulidavaru Kandante) are expecting something that is highly commercial and that would be appealing to the masses, the fact is that the original film has less to do with the commercial elements. We don’t know How Gautham Ramachandran has changed Richie but here we will take a look at what Ulidavaru Kandante was and also see that there is more to the character Richie than the black shirt and beard.

Ulidavaru Kandante (meaning: As Seen By The Rest) had a non linear narrative which means the film doesn’t travel through the regular form of ‘start to end’ in a sequence. The film was basically a journalist trying to collect different people’s point of view on one incident that occurred at the Krishna Janmashtami celebration. The story was told as 5 chapters, each chapter is the testimony of each person associated with the crime. And one of the chapters was Richie. Richie is the son of a Pastor who had committed a crime in childhood and got arrested. His life after the punishment period in juvenile home continued as a rowdy, a very stylish one perhaps. The character doesn’t appear all along the film but is the most impressive one. The director of the film Rakshith Shetty had played Richie and must admit that he nailed it. Richie is undoubtedly a mass character, he is heroic and villainous at the same time. Richie had really cool dialogues, he appears to be someone who is proud in the way he hits people. He is a bully but not a fool, he can speak good English and deliver intelligent monologues. But Richie is not the only character Ulidavaru Kandante focuses on, there are few more. Each character was interesting and important for the film. Some had delivered extra ordinary performances as well. Each character had their own motives, there is sentiments, there is romance and there is greed as parts of these people. Reveling more details on the other characters may become a spoiler but they are as important as Richie. The entire film is connected like a spider’s web, some elements may not get clear at one point but later in the film it will. The audience must rewind the whole thing in their minds to know the significance of each character how they landed up in the particular incident. Also the film ends on an open note or rather an abrupt note for the viewers to conclude it. To narrow it down, it is an intelligent film with multiple perspectives.

The new age cinema is moving forward from categorizing films into commercial and non-commercial, but if it is to be put under a section, Ulidavaru Kandante falls under ‘parallel cinema’. It somewhat follows the pattern of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The film hadn’t received box office success but received praises from critics and got to screen in some international film festivals. If the remake lives up to the standards of the original, then Nivin Pauly will definitely have a film of great quality in his list. If they are concentrating only on Richie, it is a great character but then the entire story will be changed. Even though the character of Nivin Pauly will impress his fans, they must be ready for a different experience than the hero gimmicks of a single actor. The character will surely be something to celebrate and the film, something to appreciate. Richie is gearing up for a Ramzan release, in the last weeks of June. All we need to wait is for four more weeks to know how Richie will turn out and how the audience will accept it. The narrative and treatment of Richie (if followed the pattern of the original) will be new to the audience but Tamil Cinema is in a good state where the audience delightfully accept films like Dhruvangal 16 and Maanagaram. In Richie’s case, Nivin’s popularity will surely help the film reach a larger audience. The only assured thing is that if Ulidavru Kandante is remade with the appropriate changes, it will never fail to be a great piece of cinema.

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