Upendra’s Greatest Trick of All: 🎬 A (1998)

Revisiting Upendra’s A felt like encountering a film that had been waiting quietly for me to mature enough to understand it. Martin Scorsese once said that “movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things.” That idea came alive as I rewatched A, the same chaotic, brilliant spiral of cinema, yet transformed into something deeper, wiser, and strangely personal. I am told when A first arrived in 1998, it felt like a fever dream masquerading as a movie. Today, its madness feels prophetic. The reverse narrative no longer confuses; it reveals. Upendra’s Surya is not just a filmmaker losing control, he becomes every creator trapped between divinity and delusion. The fragmented storytelling mirrors the way memory itself betrays us: showing guilt before action, pain before love, reflection before resolution.

What once seemed rebellious now feels like a confession dressed in spectacle. The loudness has softened into lament. Every monologue echoes less as provocation and more as a plea from a man wrestling with his own creation. Beneath its bravado, A feels heartbreakingly human, a film about the unbearable tension between God and man, creator and creation, ego and emptiness. Chandini’s arc, often overshadowed by Surya’s chaos, carries new symbolic weight. Earlier, she was a tragic muse; now she feels like the soul of the film itself, purity surrounded by corruption, love surrounded by lust. Her final walk into the fire no longer reads as punishment but as purification. Fire here becomes the cosmic cleanser, burning not flesh but illusion. In that moment, she transcends Surya’s gaze and the film’s patriarchal framing, reclaiming authorship of her own story. A’s tragedy thus turns almost mythic, echoing Sita’s Agni Pariksha, not as subjugation but as emancipation through flame. Upendra’s camera continues to confront rather than comfort. It doesn’t merely observe; it accuses. Even in a world familiar with meta-cinema, A still feels startlingly raw because it implicates itself. The lens, often mirrored or distorted, becomes a symbol of self-judgment, a divine eye that sees too much. The camera, like Surya’s revolver, is both weapon and curse, a mirror of creation that exposes the rot it feeds on. Throughout the film, mirrors and fire serve as Upendra’s twin pillars of meaning. The mirror represents ego, infinite, multiplying, devouring itself in reflection. The fire represents truth, painful, cleansing, final. Together they stage the eternal battle between illusion and revelation. What once looked indulgent now feels biblical, a filmmaker wrestling his own angels and demons. Even the film’s reverse narrative becomes symbolic, as if life, when played backward, reveals not chaos but cause. In Upendra’s universe, time bends not to logic but to guilt. Every flashback is a confession, every cut an incision. Cinema itself becomes surgery, the director’s tool for cutting open the human psyche. A is a film that evolves with its audience. Each viewing sharpens its meaning, turning excess into urgency and chaos into catharsis. Scorsese’s belief that movies awaken our vision rings true here. A is such a memory, one that mutates as we grow, demanding new interpretations each time we return. Upendra’s audacity remains peerless. He uses cinema not as a storyteller but as a seer, diagnosing his own madness through moving images. Watching A again is not an act of nostalgia but of confrontation. The film hasn’t changed, but we have. And that, perhaps, is Upendra’s greatest trick of all, turning cinema into scripture, and spectacle into self-reflection.