Credited cast: | |||
Arya | ... | Madhu Balakrishnan / Maruvan (as Aarya) | |
Anushka Shetty | ... | Ramya / Varna | |
Jaya Bachchan | ... | Ramya's Professor (as Jaya Bhaduri) | |
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Venkatesh Harinathan | ... | Venky |
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Ashok Kumar | ... | Madhu Balakrishna's Father |
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Padu Raman | ... | Chief Doctor |
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Selva | ||
Rest of cast listed alphabetically: | |||
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George Baskhajauri | ... | Dead man on the ground |
Madhu (Arya) and Remya (Anushka) slowly but surely falls in love but fate has them separated. Parallelly, we have Maravan (Arya) and Varna (Anushka) a high spirited warrior living in a fantasy world and have a different love story. Varna is tough and does not want to get married and be someone's slave. Madhu goes in search of his lady love to fantasy world filled with flying creatures, beautiful green forests and his life intervenes with that of Maravan. How he helps the lovers, saves Maravan and how Varna discovers love forms the rest of the story. Written by Sudharsan
This film sets a benchmark in Indian cinema. A fantasy film with creativity at its peak. General audiences often draw comparisons with Avatar, One thing to be made clear, IU is not a mainstream fantasy story like most Hollywood films of the similar genre. Selvaraghavan has related the Sufi and Zen concept in plot. His direction, screenplay and dialogs were flawless. Arya's performance was excellent in the first half but was just good as Maruvan. Anushka as both Ramya and Varna was excellent. The songs by Harris were melodious. However, Anirudh's BGM was not up to the mark as few parts of his score had reminiscence of '3'. Selvarghavan has to be lauded for his concept in this story development that has never been seen before. This is not a film, its a fairy tale. Indian audiences should be prepared to accept a change in film genres and watch it with an open mind with wisdom. All those negative reviews are by critics/viewers who lack wisdom and rational thinking. Its obvious that general viewers lack the ability to decipher simple metaphors in few scenes of this film. The only question, when Indian audiences like Hollywood films like Inception though its depth is significantly complex, why cant they accept much simple and straightforward quality Indian films like IU and the rest? Those mindsets have to change for Indian cinema to progress.