Writer and director: Suresh Mari
Cast: Urvashi, Dinesh, Lollu Sabha Maaran
Available in: Theatres
Duration: 145 minutes
At some point in the film, we see Urvashi’s J Baby, the titular character watch Baby’s Day Out (1994) with her grandchildren. The film’s tagline too has a reference to this Patrick Read Johnson directorial. This scene subtly conveys two important aspects that the entire film elaborately (and sometimes exhaustingly) works on.
Let’s draw a few similarities between the ‘babies’ in these two films. Well, there is no ransom threat in the Urvashi film. So their reasoning for stepping out are different. Yet as a character study, they are in their own worlds, exploring and roaming around the cities as they wish. Unbeknownst to themselves, they do cause a lot of trouble and the directors — both Johnson and Suresh Mari — milk it for funny moments. But it’s necessary to point out how differently the world views them both. For, it looks at a child as someone innocent and an old person as ignorant.
The film underlines how old people deserve as much care as a baby, what with having spent all their life toiling for their kids. In this film, Baby gets married at 13 and has five children — Shankar (Dinesh), Sekhar (Lollu Sabha Maaran), Selvi, Sharmila and Selvam. We never get to see her husband who, we are told, is dead. Right from the doodles in the opening credits, you only see Urvashi taking care of the kids. But when the tables are turned, are her children now ready to swap roles?