Thoughts on Love Story

 Love Story –Inter Caste “Romance” forayed into a thoughtful direction

Romantic dramas these days have their heart mostly at places where there is cruelty and bias based on caste, colour or religion. I’m not especially addressing financial background as a requisite of division, to put it in simple words, the strained relationship between a person from a family of means and the other not so much, because this particular line has become a major subtext of rom-drams mentioned before.  

Now take a movie like Uppena, or Colour Photo or Sridevi Soda Centre or…………, the equation is simple, there is a village, a boy and girl by virtue of destiny cross each other, the boy is flattered first ( girl also, but we generally see the world from boy’s eye), boy meets girl, boy stubbles ( you know a better word) the girl, boy proposes and simultaneously girl meets boy. She also eventually accepts the proposal and they both celebrate, make and blossom their love by rejuvenating each other in their beautiful and scenic village locales

Then comes a certain backlash towards the relationship in the form of a character (also called villain), generally from the girl’s side, as hers is the side that is fragile and vulnerable to stigmatic words like society, respect, recognition. Then we get to a suspenseful second half, which keeps them both on the run, until, they make sacrifices and put out their point to the evil villain in the climax. They end the movie by living happily ever after. Sukhantam / Subham.

Now here’s Shekhar Kammula’s Love Story, a common title reminiscing the simplicity of the creator himself, which isn’t the run of the mill rom-dram with a straightforward social comment. It’s cute, mature and warmly welcoming at first. The boy and girl are not in a village, they are from a village. They do cross each other, but there’s no highlight on love at first sight.

The boy meets a girl, the girl meets a boy, and they both converse more than exchanging words, they share their world views. This is nuanced in an excellently layered scene where both of them talk in a park after they bump into each other again, but you can sense the dread (that malicious villain) interrupting their meet just virtually as her phone bursts up into the ringtone whenever they subconsciously proceed further in the conversation than just talking like strangers. A single scene to sum the movie up.

They both fall in love, but you never know the exact magic moment when one sparked for the other. They were, are and will be genuinely progressing into a serious relationship from the moment they both chanced each other. This is where Shekhar Kammula’s film is leagues ahead in conceiving romance. Just like the couple, his writing of romance, those candid conversations, adorable world and pertinent characters - was, is and will be genuinely refreshing, in otherwise the radical subjects that he chooses.

This is the moment where she lights up the screen with her energetic and charming dance moves as her body slings and bends at impossible angles to the beat of Evo Evo Kalale. The choreography of this love song puts their connection with dance on the forefront than just them exploring theatre, coffee shops or parks as a couple in Hyderabad. They both just started bonding with Zumba.

Shekhar Kammula’s filmography from Leader lost the distinctive casualness and the ethereal space it would take us to, which came rather naturally with his prior subjects. His comeback film Fidaa never rose above the horizon for me as I felt he smartly forayed into the rarely touched (back then) Telangana civilities, which replaced that “manchi coffee lanti cinema” USP I treasured since my childhood.

Here in Love Story, he masterfully adds back that x-factor along with the Telangana canvas and also clearly makes a statement that he knows when in the film to bring what. The result of that is the Kammula’s touch of running a parallel romantic track between their dance students which gets viciously affected by the same inherent flaw in the mindset of the girl’s family that the boy is from a background which is in at least one aspect a sharp contrast to that of the girl. Here the aspect being class and money. Kammula shows us that even if we move from a village to a city, these immature stereotypes leading to heartbreaking casualties, still persist.

Also Read : A Milestone for a Milestone - Anand 

Another result of his masterful creation is the sweet musical outputs from Pawan CH. A romantic movie without a great soundtrack? It’s bound to fail, almost on every level. A romantic movie with a soundtrack that’s so catchy and sweet to ears? It’s bound to succeed, at least on some level. Notice how Shekhar Kammula uses the smash hit Saranga Dariya as the last free-flying moment of a butterfly-like character of hers, only to get her wings stapled to the wall by the malignant villain.

The only setback that I felt from the movie was the hurried execution of few landmark scenes in the movie. Sai Pallavi’s first break into the crescendo of electrifying dance for Evo Evo Kalale opens up within seconds. Her character should’ve lingered on ultimately unleashing her temptation to express her charisma in dance. Even in the climax speech by Naga Chaitanya’s character, the character transition where he takes a huge step to raise his voice and rebel against the caste oppression happens within seconds. 

Shekhar Kammula’s world of Love Story also covers with subtlety a multitude of other societal evils like child harassment, untouchability etc. His world has drawn people, irrespective of age group. I saw the theatre filled with extended families and even a few differently-abled enjoying as a part of the group to watch the film. That’s how open and appealing his institution of films are.

 I frankly don’t belong to the world of Love Story, I belong more to the world of Anand or Godavari, but it did impact me at a deeper level. Now, that is a sign of an auteur trying to use his craft to reflect his urgent and angry worldview, so that his films make an impact. This sign is rarely to be found in Telugu Cinema. This director is rarely to be found in Indian Cinema.