Much of Telugu Cinema usually has a dearth of stories to tell. When it does find new stories to tell, it often lacks ingenuity in the narrative. This is a paradox, because the Telugu speaking regions aren't exactly short of stories to tell, proven by how illustrious our newspapers tend to get. Of course, a lot of films have their basis on the hinterlands of these regions. They derive their characters from there, their conflicts, resolutions, and emotions are inspired by them; yet the narrative is usually lost while being translated to formulaic tedium.
Hence, I was naturally elated that, with "Rangasthalam", even commercial Telugu Cinema had found a new language. A much needed, fresher one. Yet, one cannot neglect the feeling that the film, its language, characters, and background still feel like a staging, and not a setting. A well thought out, well executed one, but a staging nonetheless. That is not the case with "C/O Kancharapalem". It is one of those films that feels like the end product of a lifetime spent documenting a region, with a keen eye for events, details, and emotions.
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I read somewhere that Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" ends with a freeze frame and that this ending is entirely well deserved, compared to films that exploit that effect as a shortcut to an effective climax. I think it's safe to say that "Aruvi" lies in the same fold as Truffaut's venerable classic - it ends with a freeze frame that is both entirely well deserved and the only way this narrative could have effectively ended without ruining its carefully constructed emotional balance. Let's talk about the narrative first, for which we will have to talk about the film's premise. The film is about small town livelihood disrupted before one's aspirations ever had the chance to achieve clarity, let alone take flight. Aruvi experiences this, and then goes through varied forms of oppression and harassment that society usually offers girls. But then, in a quirky take on karma, she decides to revolt, takes matters into her hands, and churns things up not only for herself but for the folks responsible for her predicament.
Commercial Telugu Cinema needed a new language. Not content: several new writers and directors have been trying out new and previously unseen content, with mediocre results. What it needed, was a new narrative voice. One that can push Cinema, if not the boundaries, at least the way it prevails and it's existential details. S.S. Rajamouli contributed heavily to this, yet his Cinema is mostly about the grandeur of an idea and not the richness of the world around it.
With "Rangasthalam", Sukumar brings along a movie that takes the template of popular cinema and does very interesting things with it. There's three beautiful parts to this: the content, the detail, and the visual narrative. Firstly, the content subverts so many tropes of Telugu Cinema that have become, to say the least, routine and uninspiring. It is hard to dwell deep on this without spoiling the film, but it may be adequate to say this: the film completely ignores the predictability of structures in the story, the constituent power dynamics, and good - evil tradeoffs that plague most other films. Sukumar is gutsy to have tried this. |
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