The female character who matches our Swati Reddy here, she is barely in the plot. And I know that it starts with two male characters and continues with them primarily for the entire script. Which, thanks to having been obsessed with it for about 3 years in high school, I can recite almost verbatim. The most interesting part, to me, is that in order to make it all about her character, they had to radically change the source material. And it is all started off by a female character! Swati Reddy, who I saw and loved already in Amen, playing a determined character who knows what she wants and does everything she can to make sure she gets it. Instead of crazy camera angles and quick editing and fancy fight scenes, it is about long conversations and eccentric characters and light romances. It came out in 2008, the same year as Bujjigaddu, my other favorite, and it could not be more different. But there is also a tradition of films, I am discovering, with strong complicated central female characters, where it is less about big action scenes and more about human comedy. Like the one I watched yesterday.īut, to balance, this film is a reminder that the opposite is true of Telugu films! You think “Telugu” and you think of stalking and one tight slap and item numbers and blech. And even today it pops up in the films that don’t get the big think pieces and film festival premiers. But I am beginning to realize that starting in the late 90s through the 2010s, most films had this sort of thoughtless populist misogyny in them. If you think “Malayalam”, you think of Bangalore Days and Premam and wonderful films with wonderful strong female characters. Not “hidden” like it was hard to see in the film, but like no one talks about those films. In yesterday’s review, I was all depressed about the hidden misogyny in Malayalam film. What a fun recommendation! Thank you Moimeme! An unassuming movie that is great on many levels.
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