Once More

If you are a believer in destiny, life is all about second chances. Once More takes that idea and builds a romantic drama around a man who has almost forgotten what happiness feels like. Raghuvaran is stuck in a depressive state, barely pushing through each day, when Anjali, a woman who is quite literally walking sunshine, enters his life. She refuses to let him remain in his shell and slowly gives him another shot at happiness.

Guy sees girl. Guy follows girl. Guy stalks girl. Eventually, girl falls for him. This is a template Tamil cinema has used several times over the last few years; some heroes have actually made entire careers doing just this. It is due to this overall situation that Once More’s first sequence grabs your attention. Raghu (Arjun Das) is seated at the Velachery bus stop — his bike has broken down, and he has to find some other means of transport to get home. With cab drivers unwilling to take up the ride, Raghu is wondering what to do. Enter a bright red car, with his college junior, Anjali (Aditi Shankar), offering him a lift.

To call Once More an intense love story would be to reduce it to just one aspect that make this film wonderfully frustrating. Instead, I’d prefer to look at this story of a man named Raghuvaran (Arjun Das) as something of a cruel whodunnit. I call it that because the Raghu we first meet can barely be called a person who is well and alive. He’s a corpse, that’s just about capable of walking and talking. When we see him in constant conversation with both a priest as well as a psychiatrist, we see him grappling with spirituality and/or science to bring him alive. Instead of saying ‘Raghu is…’, the film trains you to say ‘Raghu was…’