Metro Plus, The Hindu’s supplement dated June 30, 2008 carried this article on the lose of originality in Tamil movies. Some of our recent Tamil hits seems to be Hollywood spin-offs, or is it? There are details about many Tamil movies which have scripts lifted from Hollywood hits. A paragraph from this front page article.
If everyone thought Anniyan made by highly acclaimed director Shankar was brilliant, here comes the shocker – the story was lifted from the Sidney Sheldon bestseller Tell me your dreams.
I had seen Anniyan and had indeed liked the movie. Was indeed shocked to know it’s story was lifted from the book and no reference to the book was mentioned. Or was it true? I had not laid hands on that book and hence to know the plot within Sidney’s bestseller, I logged on to Wikipedia and searched for Tell me your dreams. After going through the plot summary, I doubt the veracity of the article by Swarupa Pillai(the one who wrote the article in Metro Plus).
There is indeed one similarity between the book and the movie, that being – The Multiple Personality Disorder. But that just is a factual possibility around which the plot of the book and movie are woven. And these plots I personally believe are much less similar to each other. The circumstances in which the multiple personalities are born, their impact on the central character’s mental status and the message the two carry are all dissimilar. It is wrong to say that Anniyan’s story was “lifted” from Tell me your dreams.
The first appearence of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) in Indian movies was in Mohanlal starrer Manichitratazhu, released in 1993 it was remade into Chandramukhi in Tamil and Bhool Bhulaiya in Hindi. All these movies had plots built around the same fact – The central character suffers from MPD. I am not sure, if any movie based on MPD was released before 1993.
Very few Tamil films are original and worth talking about, and I believe Anniyan is surely one among them.
P.S. Believe I am stating something wrong? I have not read Tell Me Your Dreams and hence am not sure if the movie and the book have the same plot. I believe otherwise, and hence have expressed it via this post.
