Language: Telugu
It is dark outside and two fuzzy silhouettes are seen discretely moving across a banana plantation. A few more people join, and things start to escalate, only to end with one dead body and one amputated hand. We later learn that it is four brothers fighting over a single acre of their mother’s land. It is supposed to communicate with us the village’s land lust, and it does. The same family becomes relevant again when it is time for the hero to proclaim his place as the people’s saviour. A family who had drawn blood long before the film has even begun listens to our hero for just a minute and realise their mistakes. There is something comforting about the fabric of a masala film, where everything the hero needs to happen just happens.
But is that enough?
Tuck Jagadish is set in Bhudevipuram, a village in East Godavari, if I am to go by the vehicle registration codes. Nobody is really happy there. The landowners are greedy and want more land, which leaves the farmers who own small fields open to attack. If Prakash Raj’s character from Seethamma Vakitlo Sirimalle Chettu is made to live in this village, he would die of heartbreak in the first few minutes. As always, the fight is between two upper-caste families: one good Naidu and one evil Naidu. The good Naidu, played by the ever reliable Nasser, dies one fine day, as older men with huge ancestral properties do, and things start to fall apart. How Jagadish, Naidu’s youngest son, puts the things back together is what the film’s about.
Shiva Nirvana, the writer and director of the film, wanted to say many things, most of them noble, even if not new. One of them is the relationship between Jagadish and his niece, Chandramma, played by Aishwarya Rajesh, who brings gravity and meaning to this woman’s childish stubbornness and eventual pain. Bosu (Jagapathi Babu) inviting the importance of blood relations is a clever way to establish his nature, and is decent foreshadowing as well. But everything else is the same as it was in films from the '90s. Instead of letting hindsight guide him to make better versions of old tropes, the filmmaker chooses to make them worse, without much to counteract the results. To his credit, some of the emotional scenes do work. But then again, it could just be Gopi Sundar’s loud and openly manipulative background music. If the viewer is crying with a headache while a sad scene is going on screen, it is still a win, apparently.
The most frustrating thing about this film is that nothing is really earned. The twists that we can see from afar. The villains that are supposed to be scary, but are just annoying. The evil brother whose evilness is never explained, and is quickly forgiven. Even the Gatsby-esque plot device that promises great drama is not handled well. See, I get that masala cinema has its own set of rules. That is why I keep bringing up the word commercial, just to let you know that I am judging this film by those standards. Even so, there are rules, still. Potboilers do not have time to flesh out characters, which is why they use templates that are easily recognisable and self-explanatory. This film does not do that; we do not know what is going on in any character’s mind at any given moment.
With cinema like this, where there are so many external conflicts, there is not much time to cultivate the chemistry between the lead pair, which is why filmmakers repeat the leads that work.
You can tell a lot about a film by its title. Depending on how thoughtful it is, you will know the intentions of the film. Except for the fact that hero’s midriff is focused on more than the heroine’s, I didn’t find much relevance. Speaking of which, Nani is perfectly adequate in the film, but you do not get where he is by being adequate. The best thing about Nani’s acting is it is effortless. Everything he says/does feels like an extension of his own personality. That is where his charm comes from, so does the title 'Natural Star.' But when you take that and try to fit it into the rigid mould of a commercial hero, one who has to walk and talk a certain way, and one who is not allowed his awkwardness and flaws, it quickly takes the allure away. It is neither the film’s fault nor Nani’s, but his best scene in the film should not be his introduction — Prasad Murella’s camera begins begins with Nani’s midriff, and then goes to his face, almost visually spelling the title of the film. The same goes for Ritu’s Varalakshmi. She is not the kind of actor who can disappear and appear when the scene demands it, and still be captivating.
One of the many lines in the film that tries to elevate the hero goes like this: ‘Dhaari thappina Chanti bidda ki Amma chepina katha needhi’ (You are the story a mother tells to her lost child). Great line, but therein lies the problem of the film. We are not children anymore, are we? We see the way the film never mentions caste while entering the story around an upper-caste man in a setting that is hardly casteless. We see through the kind of feminism which proclaims that no woman should be made to cry, yet the film is crowded by women who are made to carry the burden of the men in their lives. Forget algorithms, commercial cinema has trained us well enough. We do not expect a good experience anymore. We are just happy if we come out of it alive. Since I did, maybe it is not that bad. Who can tell?
Tuck Jagdish is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.
Rating: **1/2
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