Skip to main content

Life is Beautiful ( Telugu Movie) : Musings

By
Truth & beauty: these comprise the goal of art. Few works of art do justice to either. Rarer still do justice to both. Sekhar Kammula is one among the finest directors in Telugu with the penchant for weaving ordinary incidents in middle-class people’s life with extraordinary finesse and sensibility – combining truth & beauty. He is the directorial equivalent of R.K. Narayan.
Telugu movies by and large do not trust audiences’ intelligence. Experimenting is a taboo and the advertised novelty is confined to bringing in freshness to the routine formula stories. It is in this context, Kammula stands apart from the rest in truthfully portraying the middle-class sentiments and life and sketching them in detail. The underlying theme of Kammula’s movies has always been – Life is Beautiful – despite the problems, failures, disappointments, rejections, humiliations etc.

“Life is Beautiful” (LIB) is a nostalgic tour down the memory lane and will surely evoke the beautiful memories we all have about our childhood colony. In that age of innocence where the line between dream and reality is blurred! Where happiness is interspersed even with moments of sore tragedies. Where forgetfulness is a boon as the unpleasant memories are flushed out of mind.

 LIB is few notches lower than Kammula’s movies so far. This I presume is mainly because he fell in love with his work and couldn’t assess the film objectively. But his sensitivity and sensibility is intact. The sensible scenes in the film by itself are rewarding and the rest is bonus. He has extracted good performances from the lead ensemble team all of whom are debutants.

The way Kammula portrays conflicts is interesting. In his films, instead of the surreal powerful cruel villains, we have antagonists whose flaw is egoism and indifference to fellow-humans rather than outright cruelty.

 And none surpasses him in characterization of woman. Women in the Telugu movies exist merely because they are put on. Apart from appearances in songs they have little to do in the story. But in Kammula’s movies they are the essential ingredients of the cinematic palette – full of meaning, connection and harmony in relation to story.  They’re strong-willed, independent, earthy and sometimes full of vanity too. The manner in which he presents his lead ladies sensually without any trace of vulgarity is commendable.

In all his films, his focus is on the theme: The journey is the reward. Life is meant to be lived in full – disappointments form as much a part of life as successes. And what matters is the people who are with you during those testing times. Friends are the true treasure of any person.

As much as I appreciate Kammula’s movies, I also feel he is hopelessly idealistic & allows beauty to win over truth effortlessly. But that’s reel life. And nobody pays to see a sorrowful movie often a reflection of their own life. But as he says, in retrospect, life is indeed beautiful. The rough edges of past are smoothened and the rest embellished. The emotion once heartfelt becomes a distant reminder no longer relevant.  

Enough of pandering! Back to real life where things are as bitter as they are beautiful.              


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

All-time Hits

The Controversial Caste System of Hinduism

By
Imagine concepts like feudal system, slavery, capitalistic exploitation and anti-Semitism being used to define the core of Christianity! Christians will be outraged at this inappropriate mixing of the core universal values of Christians and societal & historical aspects which merely existed in a Christian world. Now this raises the question – why is caste system defined as the core of Hinduism? Especially as “caste” itself is a western construct. Sounds irrelevant? Okay. Now imagine concepts like slave-trade, war on infidels, brutal subjugation of masses, temple destruction, and forceful conversions marking the core of Islam. It is considered sensible to first understand what the core scriptures speak about the religion and its universal values. The ills of the community & its societal aspects are differentiated from its core philosophy. Now, this brings us to the most interesting question – why is Caste System (caste based on birth) propagated to be the def...
3 comments
Read more

Chetan Bhagat : His Literary Style and Criticism

By
Chetan Bhagat’s (CB) recent column created a furore, chiefly because of his audacity to speak for Muslim community and what many people conflate with his support for Narendra Modi’s Prime Ministerial ambitions.   But what interested me most - and what this post would focus on - is questioning of his literary merit (or lack of it). Many journalists ridicule CB’s style of writing and his oversimplistic portrayals of characters sans nuance or sophistication. But I suspect this has more to do with the fact that his readers alone far outnumber the combined readers of many journalists - a point that many don’t appear capable of digesting. No takers for layman’s language! When Tulsidas rewrote Ramayana in Avadhi (a local contemporary dialect then), many conservative sections of society came down heavily upon him for defiling the sanctity of a much revered epic (originally written in Sanskrit). When Quran was first translated in Urdu (by Shah Abdul Qadir in 1798), it faced...
3 comments
Read more

The concept of Dharma in Ramayana

By
The concept of Dharma is not adequately understood by Hindus themselves, not to mention others. Dharma is not a set of do’s and don’t’s or a simplistic evaluation of good and bad. It requires considerable intellectual exertion to even begin understanding Dharma, let alone mastering its use. Is Dharma Translatable? Few words of a language cannot be faithfully translated into another without injuring its meaning, context & spirit. English translations of Dharma are blurred and yield words like religion, sense of righteousness, discrimination between good and bad, morals and ethics or that which is lawful. All these fall short of fully grasping the essence of Dharma. Every language has an ecosystem of words, categories and grammar which allow a user to stitch words together to maximum effect such that meaning permeates the text without necessarily being explicitly explained at each point. Sanskrit words such dharma, karma, sloka, mantra, guru etc., now incorporated in Eng...
6 comments
Read more