Looked at as a Telugu-language melodrama about a lost fisherman and his hopeful beloved, Chandu Mondeti’s Thandel, streaming on Netflix from March 7, is just a routine thunder and lightening melodrama and a pretty soggy one at that, as much of the action pans out at sea.
But then there is Sai Pallavi. An actor who can light up the barn in any yarn. Cleverly, Mondeti’s screenplay tilts enticingly towards the lady-in-waiting. Sai Pallavi does the rest. She plays her character Satya as level-headed romantic, hopelessly and endlessly in love with her fisherman-lover Raju(Naga Chaitanya).
But she knows when to restrain her emotions from going overboard. After Satya serves up an ultimatum – it’s either the sea or me – and Raju lets her down, Satya resolves to end their relationship (which everyone knows cannot happen). So strong is her resolve to see her plan to its conclusion that she even lets her father bring home a prospective groom (Karunakaran) a slightly older wiser man who won’t marry Satya until she brings her relation with Raju to a formal closure.
These shyly adroit plot points give the narrative a thrust that makes it notches better than it would be otherwise. Indefensibly, the writer invests incommensurate time building up the hero’s character as a mover and a shaker. This is a regrettable patriarchal trait in commercial Telugu cinema: Adding weight to the hero’s larger-than-life character until it begins to seem obscenely lopsided.
Sai Pallavi escapes the curse of male totalitarianism, insidiously investing undercurrents of unscheduled emotions into her role at moments when we least expect them.
Have I praised her excessively? Damn right, I have. She deserves to be anointed far beyond the precincts of the potboiler that Thandel is by right, albeit an agreeable potboiler which, at its most basic level, keeps us watching till the end even if we know beforehand how it will end (hint:every love story doesn’t go the Laila-Majnu way).
The Pakistani episode where Raju and his co-fishermen are taken prisoners, needs to be pulled up for reprimand. It begins by demonizing the traditional enemy, and then seeking to humanize them to earn the ‘liberal’ tag. What works is the love story,especially the character of the intolerant beloved who won’t wait forever for the love of her life to return, like the soldiers’ beloved Reena Roy in Ghulami or Kareena Kapoor in LoC Kargil.
Have the times changed? Or is it just Sai Pallavi?
