Lucia

Lucia is a Kannada psychological-thriller film starring Satish Neenasam as “Nikhil” or “Nikki” and Sruthi Hariharan as “Shwetha”. After the success of Pawan Kumar’s directorial debut film Lifeu Ishtene, he worked on the concept of lucid dreaming and thus his second successful film – Lucia.

The movie is a compilation of multifarious sequence of thought processes which is attributed to the aspect of dream. The movie begins as a tale told by a common man, he constantly dreaming to become a film star and him gaining success at both the personal and the professional life. He is then seen as one who suffers from insomnia (lack of sleep) and eventually becomes a recipient of the drug “Lucia” which is given to him as sleeping pills. The main catch of the pill is that it induces in one those dreams where the mind can actually control it to a certain extent. Quite ironic this concept may seem, but it is the harsh truth about human beings, where we get to control and device our dreams though it happens in the subconscious, while the reality, which we only assume to be in our control is actually not.

Lucia uses the concept of mobile concurrency, where scenes from two different lives are shown simultaneously. It becomes difficult at a point to differentiate between the real and the reel. The very need to showcase scenes from both lives at the same time is to virtually merge differentiating lines between the real life and the imaginary life – to show that we live in an almost illusionary line, in a make-believe world mostly, yet remain oblivious of this trivial detail.

The movie has a constant swinging of the scenes, the intermingling of the reel and the real is so intense that it begins to involve in it a sense of premonition (anticipation of an event without conscious reason). But then again, as the movie progresses, it is revealed that the concept of premonition is merely used as a contrivance to add to the element of curiosity. The story line is quite interesting, for it works on telling a tale but the confusion begins when we try to perceive the story as told by whose point of view – is it actually the story of a common man or is it the story of a celebrity? It is the film star who is dreaming of his position as a common man; where many die to attain the star’s position, the star merely deigns at his position and thus, the quote shown at the end of the movie is justified, “Your small life is somebody’s big dream.” Colours too play a vital role in the movie, in reality the film star is unable to see colours due to some accident that he had in his childhood – the dreamy figure becomes an escape from this devoid and sees colours in his life. This is in a way indicative of the fact that dreams are mostly associated with colourful lives while the real lives become monotonous and thus shown in black and white light.

Lucia could be seen as a movie that shows the unaltered and unrestricted flow of thoughts, only more effectively with the help of the audio-visual elements. The movie works to depict the psyche of the human mind, how the reel and the real are two aspects with which we  peddle with every day and how dreams become an indispensable aspect in our lives, for without dreams, our lives would be nothing more than a living dead.