Synccinema Quickie - Varudu Kavalenu
Varudu Kavalenu - Strong Belief ultimately gives good results, like for the boy and girl here.
Varudu Kavalenu successfully carries forward the rare tradition of having unparalleled conviction in making a truly enjoyable family entertainer. The same family entertainers which have that unresisting owning quality for our Telugu Audience. The same family entertainers which are marred for few peculiar and repetitive issues when made by Trivikram in recent times.
Those chirpy sidekicks, quirky comedy, rich production value and most importantly not losing out on what makes a movie palatable to the audience whose mother tongue is Telugu. Characters in Varudu Kavalenu talk words like architecture and gudi, not in the same scene/context. Characters in Varudu Kavalenu talk words like project report and sree rama koti. Again, not in the same scene/ context.
It's not only about highlighting the variety in topics or words that conversations are made here about. It's about the naturally these words come out of their mouths when they talk. Just like… us, the Telugu audience watching the movie. The same goes with action, body language, drama and conflict, which subconsciously resonates with our environment.
Varudu Kavalenu is quite an entertainer for the family because it gets the important ingredients right. The movie understands the hardcore fundamental expectation from a moviegoer that they want to spend 2-3hrs so that they can go to places they could never go and feel its vibe they could never feel. Varudu Kavalanu is shot in beautiful locales with colourful frames (Cinematography by Patchipulusu Vamsi, Vishnu Sarma) of Dubai, Hyderabad and Araku. There's the ticket to travel few places and feel like a mini holiday. It has relatable characters covering both the youth and the middle-aged. So there goes the shortcut to vibe with and like them in songs, action scenes, hot conversations etc.
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The biggest win that this movie marks is its treatment. Being a female director (The gender shouldn’t strictly matter. She is a director. Period!), Lakshmi Sowjanya slightly brushes off on a women-centric approach and a world view we always see from the eyes of Bhoomi. (Yes, the protagonist is a female here. Yes, this is a commercial cinema. Now you get why this movie is special?).
We see the face of the Ritu Varma, rather than her navel, legs, breasts and whatever that made its presence from the curvy bodies of plastic faced heroines in commercial cinema. We see her versatility in performance as Ritu Varma masterfully unleashes her acting while being extremely subtle in conveying her emotion. You need not acknowledge her mood, you’ll just know if she's blushing or sobbing by looking at her.
We have some fine touches of a woman’s plight and vulnerability when she is in love, when her heart’s broken, when her age is barring above for marriage, and most importantly when her wistful, innocent mother cannot convince her for a pellichoopulu. Nadhiya as that orthodox mother is an example of casting done right. The insightful scene between Murali Sharma and Nadhiya where he opens up about his intentions about her daughter’s marriage could only come from a female voice.
But the movie hardly tries to turn a stone on the rest of the other aspects. Except for the mother-daughter, all other characters, are written with shallow importance. Naga Shourya looks uber cool and stylish, but internally his character just heads the way story tells to. The flashback in the second half, from an otherwise slow movie, comes straight out of a cliché college romance book, though there is a better Shourya here and a more interesting Bhoomi as a girl in the yesterday before she was a woman today.
The biggest slump of all is negligence or lazy writing when it comes to establishing the romance and the conflict in and around it. We see leads loving only in a montage while a romantic duet starts playing. As a result, the conflict is not solid and there is not even a featherweight of suspense as we never feel for the characters beyond a generic sense.
Music by Vishal Chandrashekhar is soothing and tuneful, most importantly is apt for the soft genre it's composing for. Digu Digu Digu Naga song by S.S.Thaman was criminally wasted because of the edit and rerecording. This song in particular plays out perfectly for the situation, surprising the writing shoulders this song, Ritu Varma is a revelation here, but you can only find that energy and verve in chop-chop rhythm.
These issues are quite synonymous with the perfect ( by perfect I mean Blockbuster) family entertainers from Trivikram. But that’s the strange bottleneck in today’s Telugu makers of this genre, if they make a perfect film, it loses out steam on some of the other nuances, if they even slightly compromise on their belief that this genre will work, their movies unapologetically turn half-baked and just too eccentric to root for.
An honest family entertainer is never half baked and moreover is the most difficult to be remade for other regional audiences. Varudu Kavalenu equates with both. It is better than what we got before and but hardly the best. It’s a festive release and let’s keep it that way.
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