'Bhale Unnade', produced by NV Kiran Kumar of Ravi Kiran Arts and Maruthi Team, hits the cinemas this Friday. In this section, we are going to review the movie.
Plot:
Radha (Raj Tarun) has avoided girls all his life. Somehow, he is deemed not only unromantic but also lacking in manliness (and manhood). When a bank employee named Krishna (Manisha Kandkur) grows interested in him because of his nature and culinary skills, she decides to get married to him. Ahead of their engagement, she starts wondering if Radha is virile at all. Is he impotent? Why does he avoid s*x? Answers to these questions are found only in the climax.
Post-Mortem:
'Bhale Unnade' is your quintessential Telugu entertainer where the conflict plot point exists not to be explored but to be used as a crutch for 'leki' comedy. Writer-director J Sivasai Vardhan's storyline had enough calibre. The film is psychologically and spiritually so impoverished that its calibre is rendered impotent.
Radha is given a profession: he is a saree draper. Despite his seeming indifference to women's affections, his decision to become a saree draper is puzzling. In mindless comedies, logic doesn't matter. We are living in the era of Hyper Aadhis and hyper mindlessness. In his very intro scene, Raj Tarun is literally sexualized. He sexily wears a saree, complete with the body language of a woman in his bedroom. The audience starts wondering if he is a crossdresser. This scene is given a cheap justification that will boggle your mind.
Radha's mother (played by an otherwise superb Abhirami Gopikumar) has only sugary conversations with him. Whenever the mother-son duo is around, honey overflows from the screen into the cinema hall. Our writers/filmmakers can only think in extremes - either dishonourable comedy or outright sugariness. Both she and the heroine talk in Telugu like those characters from 'Kalki 2898 AD'. When she is not savouring Radha's dishes, Krishna exchanges passive love letters with him. The secret identity love track is bizarre, considering that they both are too old to fall for each other's abilities to cook well/eat well.
Can a film about suspected impotence not have our 'Jabardasth' Hyper Aadhi? He is bald-headed so that he can laugh at himself for once. When he bumps into old women, he calls them aged zombies. VTV Ganesh, another flavour-of-the-season comedian, plays a failed filmmaker who comes across as sexually frustrated rather than creatively exhausted.
The dated idea of a loving, sweet old couple is marshalled in. Veteran filmmaker Singeetham Srinivasa Rao's presence fails to lend any depth to a film that is obsessed with Viagra, virility and worse.
Raj Tarun's saree draping tracks needed some investment. The film wants the audience to see his talent as an art but we barely understand what makes him unique and sought-after in the town. The question mark over his disinterest in s*x is allowed to fester for so long that the whole film is one elaborate, overlong skit. Nellore Sudarshan and Srikanth Iyengar, Racha Ravi and Goparaju Ramana, the list of artists who are forced into the script goes on and on.
Closing Remarks:
'Bhale Unnade' is full of 'leki' comedy.
