Anni Manchi Sakunamule (Telugu)
Rating: **
This is a rom-com stuffed with the most primitive clichés of baby swapping and family feuds,incomprehensible , as it tries too hard to be cool in a colourful traditional set-up. The endresult is like sipping sambhar with a straw or scooping jelly from an idli batter.
The positioning of the film is trendy.But the minds behind the endeavour don’t seem to know the difference between trendy and wannabe-cool.
The cast comprises actors whom you have probably seen when they were much younger,like Gautami playing the secretly liberal mother and Sowcar Janaki playing the feisty grandmother. These would work in the era of Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum…Aapke Hain Koun. The world has moved on.
This film is trapped in a time warp with little hope of escape from the dreary family drama with a romance between the progenies of two warring families set in the coffee plantations. Sounds good on paper. But with this film persistently getting ahead of itself, there is no space in the narration for us to connect with the bonding between Rishi(Santosh Shoban) and Arya(Malavika Nair).They behave more like facsimiles of youngsters in love than the actual thing.
While Arya’s character gets by on her spunk(and yet, how far can spunk take you down the road of junk?) Santosh Shoban with his Salman-meets-Akshay-meets-Suriya brand of humorous heroics, comes across as flat awkward and very aspirational.
The family-feud angle is not explored in any detail. The plot’s foundation is unstable and weak with a drunken doctor delivering two babies at the same time and getting them mixed up.
Oftentimes, the treatment of the tacky tale is so weak it feels like a spoof rather than an actual film. For no rhyme or reason the plot suddenly moves to Italy –so awkwardly captured the country looks like Jharkhand—where Nair and Shoban get to sing a duet that seems composed in sleep and for sleep.
Then quickly they breakup.I still don’t know why. Maybe if they had not reduced the journey abroad to Italy-sambhar their relationship would have blossomed instead withering into a deadend.
Just like the film . Are we really supposed to take this seriously? Does anyone care about which way Rishi and Arya’s relationship goes, or why a jealous uncle keeps pushing his son ahead of his brother’s son at every given opportunity.
Yes family matters. But so does grace and pace in a family drama.The characters here are not just family-oriented. They grate on your nerves with their brash brouhaha about loving the family.
