Bounce back
There’s an inside joke in the Telugu film industry that, for the last three decades, it has subsisted on rehashing five plotlines. The secret sauce of Sukumar’s vastly predictable Rangasthalam lies in the director’s impeccable use of milieu that evokes mid-’80s Andhra.
With his last two movies bombing at the box office, the maverick filmmaker bounced back with a storyline that is, frankly speaking, left-field, considering his oeuvre.
All his movies, prior to Rangasthalam, were urbane, cosmopolitan and soaked in yuppie aspirational culture. Here, however, he shifts his base to an East Godavari village and tells the story of local village politics with captivating flair.
The protagonist, Ram Charan, in a careerdefining role as Chitti Babu, is a hearing-impaired layabout in the eponymous village where he finds himself in the throes of intense action when his elder brother (Aadhi Pinisetty in fine fettle) decides to stand against the village president (a menacing Jagapati Babu) in the upcoming polls.
Sukumar plunges the viewers head first into a scene where Ram Charan is frantically cycling to save Prakash Raj from an accident. Devi Sri Prasad’s percussion-heavy background music and Rathnavelu’s roving camera from atop lend the urgency that is mostly sustained in the rest of the movie.
Like the last year release, Fidaa, it’s heartening to see Sukumar also going to the hinterland to mine this rustic gem. Keeping in vogue with the theme, there are flared bottom pants, shirts with oversized collars and copious ‘80s references to N T Rama Rao.
Telugutanam is the Andhra-Telangana equivalent of, say, Kashmiriyat, which essentially is about a piece of art that makes one proud of being a Telugu-speaking person.
I felt it most when watching Rangasthalam and also while reading Sujatha Gidla’s formidable book, Ants Among Elephants, a story about her uncle, K G Satyamurthy, co-founder of the People’s War Group. Gidla might not be a gifted writer but history will remember her for putting Telugu, a language spoken by 100 million people, on the international stage. She blisteringly picks apart the casteism pervading the Andhra belt with Brahmin, Kamma and Reddy communities crushing the Dalit Christians for years on end.
Gidla never shies away from mixing Telugu words in her written English and expects the reader to get the drift — something only European writers can get away with, thanks to their longstanding privilege.
“There isn’t a single Hollywood film on the history of the marginalisation of 200 million untouchables because there wasn’t a good story about it in English,” wrote Kancha Ilaiah in his stirring review of the book.
Similarly, Rangasthalam is a movie that can easily be taken around on the international movie circuit, thanks to its scale and a universal storyline. But the economics of Telugu cinema are such that everything runs on a tight leash — shooting, preproduction, post-production. The movie release date is fixed on the first day of the shooting.
We need to doff our hats to Ramakrishna and Mounika, the art-director duo who beautifully recreated the Godavari delta villages in a private land in Hyderabad, for coming out with such a level of detailing. At a time when the lyrics of a song have become mere crutches to its music, Chandrabose’s lyrics contain a gorgeous blend of Indian mythology and the philosophy deduced from them.
Sukumar deserves a medal for not just making a movie that pops with warmth but also having Ram Charan delivering a scintillating, flawless and confident performance, whose hearing disability becomes the movie’s biggest turning point.
Clad mostly in a lungi and sporting a pitchperfect East Godavari dialect, his Chitti Babu keeps the audience enthralled for the entire 170 minutes. More than the fact that the movie might just earn ~1 billion at the box office, a major feat for a Telugu movie, he should take heart from the incontrovertible fact that his Chitti Babu will be one of Indian cinema’s most enduring performances.
Sample these moments: The delirium on his face at his brother’s death, the hilarious ways in which he masks his hearing problems from one and all, including his lady love. In his decade-long career, Ram Charan’s acting chops finally get the platform they deserve.