Saheba Subrahmanyam Review

The way the first half is narrated, you can be forgiven for thinking that ‘Saheba.. Subrahmanyam’ is going to have a tragic end, or at least some ‘hatke’ dose in the run-up to denouement .  But it doesn’t take more than 10 minutes into the second half for one to discover that certain features of experimental cinema incorporated in the first half were all deceptive.  If anything, the film descends into the realm of the formula, with some hardly nuanced telling of the mindset of victims of gender subjugation in patriarchal families.

Subrahmanya Shastri (Dileep Kumar) finds himself behind the bars on a rainy night, but his visage tells a different story: he is apparently calm-going and soft-spoken.  The station’s SI, played by Rao Ramesh, is your good-natured cop who will encourage love birds if their emotions are pure, and will is strong.  Sahstri’s love interest, Ayesha (Priyal Gor) is the daughter of industrialist Khadar’s brother.  Rao Ramesh promises Shastri of all possible help, but Khadar (Nagineedu) and his brother (Naresh) may not relent.

To the credit of debutante Sashikiran Narayana, she executes the film well for most part.  She is crippled by the lack of a good story.  Consequently, her script lacks the capacity to sustain our interest, forget exciting us.  The worst thing that can happen while watching a film is the audience losing hope/interest in climax.  And Sashikiran achieves to do just this by robbing the heroine of her space in the second half; as for the hero, there is not much for him to talk with his girl.

The writer seems to think that but for the Hindu-Muslim element, no other element in the story lends itself for an imaginative narration.  But that’s not so.  Ayesha’s sad discovery of the lack of freedom in her male-dominated family should have been creatively leveraged to concoct heart-warming situations in the second half.  Ayesha, though a wretched soul forced into conformity, hopes that God will eventually override dogma in order to bail her out of the misfortune.  The same thinking could have lent for a lyrically profound song.

Song situations are usual but the lyrics and conceptualization of theme is worthy of mention.  However, such a film presents hackneyed scenes, too.  When you expect more, all that it has to offer is a few sequences in rain, intended to give a melancholic effect, but which are lost in translation.

The director’s attempts to nativise a Mallu script are lame.   She chips in her father’s (MS Narayana) services, but even in a film of this kind, there is no escape from Tollywood’s idiotic obsession: parodies (read Arya, Gabbar Singh’s ‘Paduddi raa.. line).  The actor who played hero’s friend has got good comic timing.  ‘Tagubothu’ Ramesh’s character bores.

This is a film that wants to retain its Mallu soul (read Che Guevara students’ union working against harmful industrialization, locales that smack of non-Teluguness), even while committing adultery with Tollywoodishness.

Verdict: All in all, ‘Saheba.. Subrahmanyam’ gets pass marks for offering a few good moments in first half, never mind the deception.

Rating: 2/5