Kamal fighting fit!

Rajitha

Heroes reluctant to risk their skins -- or moviemakers reluctant to risk their investments -- have spawned the 'dupe'.

The man who, because he bears a resemblance to the hero, gets to double for him in all those hair-raising stunts.

So now, a little twist -- a hero plays the role of a 'dupe', stuntman, fight-master, what have you, in an upcoming Tamil film.

Said hero being none other than Kamal Haasan, who will essay the title role in a film named Pammal K Sambandham.

The film has talking points in plenty. For starters, Kamal will pair with Simran for the first time.

Word was that Simran was originally considered for Thenali, the What About Bob?-inspired comedy that was Kamal's last release. Date problems nixed that pairing. And Jyotika was finally chosen to play the love interest in that film.

Simran, however, has long expressed a desire to work with Kamal, to fill a yawning gap in her curriculum vitae. And this film gives her that opportunity.

The second male lead in the film, meanwhile, is Abbas. And if the dates work out, his pair will be Jyotika. Which, in turn, will make this the first time the two reigning leading ladies of Tamil films, Simran and Jyotika, will come together in one film.

The film, being produced under the Media Dreams banner, will be directed by writer-actor-director Mouli, who returns to Tamil (as a director, that is) after a hiatus of 16 years.

Mouli has been active in Telugu as both actor and director during the interim, only occasionally coming back to Tamil in small cameo appearances -- one instance being the role of the killer in the Parthibhan-Prabhu Deva film James Paandu.

Kamal and Mouli have worked together way back in the days of black-and-white moviemaking, when Mouli played a letch in K Balachander's Nizhal Nijam Aagiradhu, the Kamal-Sharat Babu-Sumitra starrer.

For now, Kamal is busy with Aalavandhaan (Abhay, in Hindi), under the banner of producer Kalaipuli S Thanu, with Suresh Krissna directing.

The film features Kamal as twins -- both killers, one of them psychopathic, the other a trained professional whose forte is hunting down dangerous killers. The film uses this device to examine the morality of killing.

During the early stages of its making, the buzz around the industry was that the film, which features Manisha Koirala and Raveena Tandon as female leads, was a takeoff on the Anthony Hopkins-Jodie Foster starrer Silence Of The Lambs.

In actual fact, it is based on Daayam (Dice), a story written several years ago by Kamal himself, and carried in serialised form in a Tamil weekly at the time.

Kamal was expected to do Robot with Shankar after the completion of Aaalavandaan. But both Kamal and Shankar are working on their own projects and, as a consequence, haven't quite been able to marry their dates.

Robot -- in which Kamal plays a mechanised character, has thus been postponed. And Shankar is busy with work on Nayak, starring Anil Kapoor, the remake of his Tamil superhit Mudhalvan.