Losing the plot

It broke my heart when Pawan Kalyan’s character makes Murli Sharma run around a swanky office and whips him with a belt in the recently released Agnyaathavaasi (Prince in Exile). In his near two-decade career, Telugu writer-director Trivikram Srinivas never had to resort to banana-peel humour. Even the pratfalls in his earlier movies would always transcend the clichés.

But his latest shows that Srinivas is out of ideas and what’s even more dismaying is that his writing has become downright pedestrian. Here’s a writer who has been telling his audience that there is always an intelligent way to hold a conversation and even his minor characters would get stunning lines to attest to that.

All his dialogues used to be awash with philosophy, liberal ideology and delicious middle-class references, and reflected the gravitas of being written by someone who had his ear firmly to the ground.

Until Khaleja, his writing was top-notch, but has ever since been at best sputtering. Agnyaathavaasi, a loose adaptation of the 2008 French movie Largo Winch, is ostensibly about Abhishiktha Bhargava (Kalyan) who emerges from a self-imposed exile to save the empire built by his father (Boman Irani in a grab-your-cheque-and-disappear kind of role).

Khushbu is the solitary inspired casting in the movie as the step-mother with a golden heart who loves her step-son more than her own offspring. Srinivas and Kalyan are both smarting from the disaster they came out with and I don’t intend to rub it in further.

As someone who has followed his career like a besotted pup, I can say with fair authority that Srinivas should go back to doing what he does best: write lacerating dialogues that will be etched in my brain.

A scene from Srinivas’ Agnyaathavaasi

If I were a filmmaker, I would happily waltz to my grave knowing that I made something as outstanding as Athadu. Srinivas could never conjure the Wagnerian ecstasy that he evoked in me in 2005. That movie’s controlled aggression and insouciant sense of humour were never replicated by him.

Like Srinu Vaitla, another celebrated filmmaker with a string of flops, Srinivas as a director seems to be on the wane. Somewhere, this debacle reeks of the “Baahubali syndrome”.

Ever since that magnum opus called Baahubali blasted its way to the forefront of Indian consciousness, other Telugu filmmakers are feeling the pressure and want to deliver something with that kind of box office stamina. Srinivas is a major filmmaker but he’s someone who likes to weave a story around the human condition and moral values that he believes are being torn asunder from the social fabric. However, commerce has been dictating his past few moviemaking decisions and Agnyaathavaasi is the biggest indicator that he should be in a league with Sekhar Kammula, rather than be clubbed along with Rajamouli or Boyapati Srinu or Koratala Siva.

Agnyaathavaasi is a paint-by-numbers workmanlike Tollywood formula movie. Songs crop up at the most inopportune moments, fights are lethargic, there are heated-up wisecracks and an antagonist (Aadhi Pinisetty) who is never given a proper showdown with Kalyan. Two heroines exist (Anu Emmanuel and Keerthi Suresh) to raise the glam quotient and Srinivas seems to have completely missed the plot when he resorted to both of them indulging in a catfight (face slapping no less) in an inane subplot set in Bulgaria.

Telugu filmmakers wouldn’t know about the Bechdel test even if it walked over them, but even by those low standards, this is deplorable. That said, my heart goes out to Srinivas for having to make a movie that would hopefully break all non-Baahubali records.

On its first day of release across the US, the movie made a staggering $1.5 million but as word spread about its amateurish content, it started limping. Cinema is no longer an art form. Big ticketed movies get the widest possible release abroad at an insane amount, just to give bragging rights to those heroes’ respective fans.

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in