Review: Poru Telangana - Not a feature film

Hyderabad: The style is unabashedly propagandist. Makes no mistake. Steamed up with the heat of the moment, loud beyond correction, scripted more to suit a melodramatic docu-drama, Poru Telangana has some wonderful folk moments (particularly music).

If Salman Khan (non-actor) can function within a defined premise and has popular acceptance why not another paradigm- a la Narayana Murthy (full of drama and high voltage emotion). To view his film, therefore, needs a mind adjustment. Once done, the rest is a matter of course.

Poru Telangana is truly a docu-drama and not a feature film. It lacks a cohesive story line with any linear grammar. It is a coarse appliqu' of events more of recent times and some of the last century. Told with the constant intrusion of the protagonist Jithender Reddy (Narayan Murthy), the narrative shout starts with the Mulki problem in the 1950s.

From here, for either lack of skill sets or for an alternative style simply in tandem with the thematic content, it keeps clear from a fine cinematic style and is invariably amateur. The struggle for Telangana gets a quantum time leap from the 1950s to the present.

It is of the nature of an over simplistic blame-game than a socio-economic analysis of what surely and beyond debate is a popular cause. From micro-finance, unemployment displacement of rural artisans, farmer deaths, SEZ culture, everything and anything is pushed into the envelope.

There is also tales of how people have given up handloom and prefer jeans, how Gandhi wanted to encourage the local economy by encouraging local handloom, non-payment of tuition fees of OBCs in private Engineering Colleges. The resultant collage of contemporary problems defeats the very purpose.

Many of the problems are universal and cut across regions and areas. For instance, surely micro finance is not a regional problem. This like other issues shows a director who is willing to bite anything and later finds the chewing process extremely difficult.

It must be said in favour of the film maker that he hides just nothing, not even the crass methods employed to win over supporters. A film like this is difficult to evaluate. Honesty is a wonderful defence and this virtue is a banner here.

It is after all an attempt to woo crowds to the cause. You get a lurking feel that when you overstate, it is easy to reject and this turns to be the film's folly. Cast in a mould that is taken not very seriously by the critic it is also likely not to be taken seriously by a historian or even a political analyst.

The fist of fury anchors a cause, as also an emotion. The young lads at the theatre danced with gay abandon to the rhythm filled with lyrical criticism of society. There lies the issue. We are willing to trivialise anything. The film maker thinks the problem is Hamletian. It is not.

I guess it is one of political will.When the theatre of the absurd gets cinematic, the theme and the ethos of the media are likely to clash and that is the tragedy on hand.