Most people remember the incredible special effects and large-screen spectacles offered by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), but equally important to the film’s magic was the emotional undercurrent of the story. Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) play scientists invited to the titular Jurassic Park; they are also a romantic couple. But while Dr Sattler wants children, Dr Grant is not sure if he wants the responsibility of being a father.
This conflict is mirrored during the most action-packed, blood-soaked segments of the film when Dr Grant has to look after a pair of small children while they’re all on the run from the escaped dinosaurs. He has to calm them down and understand their fear and trauma, while ensuring that nobody ends up as dino-dinner. It’s basically fatherhood in overdrive within a compressed time frame.
Director Bejoy Nambiar’s latest film, the romantic thriller You are my main, employs a similar narrative gambit with its two leads, Gen-Z influencers on opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Avani aka ‘Ms Vanity’ (Shanaya Kapoor) is a mega-popular lifestyle influencer born with a silver spoon in Andheri, whereas Maruti (Adarsh Gourav) aka ‘Aala Flowpara’ is a home-grown rapper from a working-class basti in Nallasopara, one of Mumbai’s many satellite towns.
World of Gen-Z influencers
Against all odds, the two fall for each other and begin a relationship despite Avani’s family’s misgivings. However, when Avani discovers she’s pregnant, there is a communication breakdown between the two scared twenty-somethings, leaving them sullen and passive-aggressive with each other (he doesn’t want to be a father just yet; she isn’t sure what she wants). It is against this tense backdrop that they find themselves fighting for survival in an abandoned 20-feet-deep swimming pool at a ramshackle Goa guest-house, against a ravenous killer crocodile.
Also read: Kohrra Season 2 review: Mona Singh, Barun Sobti anchor an emotionally rich but meek mystery
You are my main has a crackling first half, with Adarsh Gourav’s performance in particular making the world of Gen-Z influencers believable and entertaining. The rich girl, poor boy love story also had me rooting for the young leads, despite Shanaya Kapoor’s uneven diction and beginner’s awkwardness in certain scenes.
However, the below-par second half lets the film down, with some decidedly uneven special effects and too-convenient plot resolutions, especially in terms of how the childhood trauma of Shanaya’s character is both depicted and “solved”. On the whole, You are my main comes off as an “honourable failure” rather than the resounding, genre-bending success it could have been.
Rich girl, poor boy
First, the good stuff. For me, the film’s strongest portions are the scenes that set up Flo and Avani’s love story, a classic ‘rich girl, poor boy’ story that’s performed with sincerity and a certain self-awareness by Gourav. He is a wholly contemporary young man, and he sounds like it. While asking Avani out, he says, “0 % toxic, 100 % satisfaction warnaa paise waapas!” His turn of phrase, his accent and his delivery are all deeply informed by Mumbai’s hip-hop artists i.e. the “real” Gully Boys.
Gourav, known for his stellar outings in The White Tiger and more recently, Superboys of Malegaondelivers another superb performance here. He has so many of the traits associated with once-in-a-generation performers: Charisma, screen presence, a chameleon-like ability to disappear under the skin of his characters.
Shanaya Kapoor’s below-par Hindi diction is, to an extent, camouflaged because of the nature of her Westernised, English-speaking character. She is serviceable in the first half but is quite clearly out of her depth in the second half, once the emotional stakes rise. She appears believable and authentic while she is preening and posing for the cameras as her “Ms Vanity” avatar. The love story between Avani and Flo is what Brahmastra’s first 30 minutes should have been (remember, there too we had a rich girl poor boy setup) — where Ayan Mukerji’s film struggled to present a believable Gen-Z romance, You are my main excels in this aspect.
However, Shanaya couldn’t really sell her character’s pregnancy dilemma, nor could she effectively communicate the raw terror Avani feels in the face of the crocodile. These are the portions in the film where one is reminded of her lack of experience and her awkwardness in pathos-filled scenes.
Same old Bejoy Nambiar problems
Bejoy Nambiar has always known how to shoot pretty set-pieces and slo-mo-lined dramatic sequences. His previous films like Satan and David are powerful reminders of this. However, those films also show that Nambiar’s work is often too much style and too little substance. Nambiar is a highly skilled operator, but this high degree of technical skill often works against his films, ignoring screenplay nuances in favour of a bombastic, showy visual approach.
Also read: Semmalar Annam on how Mayilaa, her Tamil film, depicts the travails of a rural woman
Both these sides of Nambiar are on full display in You are my main. Early in the film there is a beautiful meet-cute between Avani and Flo, which shows off Nambiar’s distinctive camerawork. Flo is being roughed up by the guards outside Avani’s palatial house, because he and his friends are shooting Reels at the gate without authorisation. Just then, Flo spots Avani on the nearby balcony and the scene turns into the Romeo and Juliet balcony serenade, kind of. Flo steps on to the iron gate and wheels away in slo-mo from the guards, like a cheeky schoolboy on a Segway. The easy kineticism of the sequence, the immaculate framing, the close-ups; this is Nambiar showing off his full suite of skills.
In the second half, however, Nambiar doesn’t do so well as the director of a “Creature Film”. We never really see the crocodile as the decisive factor in the film, because the threat that the animal represents is constantly trivialised by quips like “gutter ka Godzilla”, or by a scene where Flo and Avani are trying to reach a packet of Chinese takeout before the crocodile does.
The result is that the second half is a tonal mess — it’s not quite a creature movie, nor a pure romantic drama, remaining stuck in limbo between the two. Nambiar also has a recurring problem of not knowing when and how frequently to cut away from the action. When Avani is trying her best to save Flo from drowning during a scene, she is reminded of her childhood trauma of watching her parents drown following a car crash. But Nambiar cuts between the two moments in time so aggressively, and so often, that neither sequence gets the space that it deserves and neither sequence packs the emotional punch that it could have.
It doesn’t help that the crocodile itself isn’t world-class VFX, to put it mildly. It is neither wholly cartoonish (an artistic and budgetary choice I could have gotten behind) nor wholly photo-realistic and so, it adds to the tonal confusion on display. Look at a low-budget film like Lakadbaggha (2023), for instance. There we had a hyena mauling people just like the crocodile does here. But the special effects themselves, surely made at a fraction of the cost, looked so much better than they do here. The hyena truly comes off as a deadly threat, an existential question at the heart of the film.
You are my mainthen, is another Bejoy Nambiar film that’s stuck in the “what could have been” zone. I am convinced that he still has a truly great, maybe even world-class genre-bending movie in him. But this isn’t that movie.
Comments are closed.