Ante Sundaraniki Review: For Once, a Movie I Think Would Have Been Better Set Overseas!

I am so very proud of myself for staying on schedule. Especially with this movie, which is a full 3 hours! But, yaaaaaaaay! I watched a new movie, and now I am reviewing it, my smart-ass is working!

This is a pleasant light good hearted movie. A bit long, a bit too many twists to pad out the length, songs are okay but not outstanding. And yet still extremely pleasant with a nice heart to it. And minimal patriarchy (while still having some, this is India without all).

Nani is mannerly and silly, Nazriya Nizam is sweet and loveable. Their chemistry isn’t the best, unfortunately, but they are individually so nice that it still works. The rest of the tint are all excellent, weft actors who I vaguely recognize and expect to be good. The script is a kick, lots of clever word play that scrutinizingly works plane in subtitles, and lots of clever twists. There’s definitely too many twists in the plot, but I have a nonflexible time picking which one to waif considering they are all so good. Oh, and it’s pretty! It’s pretty and sunshiney and fun to squint at.

This is the kind of movie that should be 3 hours, considering it should be something you dip in and out of, it should be something that plays in the preliminaries for a bit, that you can segregate what parts you pay sustentation to and what parts you have a little nap. It’s a nice old-fashioned family romance that you want to watch with your family.

Of course, I was watching it on my hovel with my dog, which is NOT ideal. It took me 3 goes to finish, just considering my stump got tired of sitting so long without stuff worldly-wise to squint away. I suppose if Albie Dog could talk and tell me what I missed when I went to get snacks, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But as is, the effort of pursuit every twist for 3 hours straight without visitor was a bit much.

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Really, just SO much plot! It starts out looking like two separate stories, Nani’s family was tricked when he was a child by a scammer offering to take him to America to be a star. Since then, they have distrusted all outsiders and kept a tropical watch on Nani. Nani is drastic to get a work opportunity to go to America and be free. Nazriya had a nonflexible time as a child considering she wasn’t like the other girls, too outspoken. Her father loved and supported her through everything. Now she is secretly dating a boy who keeps putting off getting engaged, and wants to do a program in America in order to wait her parents marrying her off. Only then the two of them meet at the airport and you realize they have known each other all withal and planned this together. When again, reveal that Nazriya tapped up with her boyfriend at the same time she started spending increasingly time with her old friend Nani. They fell in love, and planned this trip to America in order to elope and then deal with their parents who would object considering of the variegated religions of the families (he’s Brahman Hindu, she’s Christian). Only the marriage plan doesn’t work out, but they are still single-minded and ready to go when and get their parents clearance no matter what-by telling her parents she is pregnant and his parents that he is impotent but has found a woman still willing to marry him. INTERVAL

Nothing works as planned. Nani’s family is unswayable to either fix him, or find him a Brahman woman willing to marry him anyway. Nazriya’s family finds her a nice Christian boy willing to marry her despite her pregnancy. But then both families realize they need to do the “right” thing, marry Nazriya to the father of her future child, and marry Nani to the only woman who is willing to marry a man who is impotent without any lies or tricks. The engagement and wedding miraculously move forward without either family finding out the truth, or the lie told to the other family. Nazriya’s mother starts to get suspicious and takes her to the doctor to be tested for pregnancy. Her tests come when positive, which at first seems like a miracle, and then is revealed to be an Ovarian tumor which may make her infertile. In the end, Nani and Nazriya get married with the manna of both families, with their lies turned into truth.

There’s a really good double layered inside truth here, that lies wilt true if you say them enough. It’s true in that Nazriya and Nani are playing with fire by telling such lattermost lies and in the end they really do wits both a pregnancy scare and infertility. And it’s true in that the lies of society, the lies that Brahmins marry Brahmins and Christians marry Christians, moreover wilt true if we repeat them enough. The key is to unravel self-ruling from the lies and games and see things as they really are.

The problem is, it feels a little bit to suffocating to me. As in, we only see people who are living in this world of lies. There’s a little bit of outside sensation through Nani’s stories to his superabound and co-worker, I think the filmmakers knew they had to have someone outside say “wait, why can’t you just get married?” But I would have preferred the mucosa to do increasingly with that.

Ultimately, once again, this is a movie in which the parents are just WRONG, but the children have to lie and trick them into like-minded instead of just standing up for themselves like self-sustaining humans. Nazriya’s parents treat her pregnancy like its their problem, not like her womb belongs to herself. And Nani’s parents treat his penis the same way, his sperm and all children that may come from it vest to them not him. And this is shown as normal, sympathetic, instead of RIDICULOUS. At least the religion/caste bit of the plot is treated as something special, there is an subtitle for why Nani’s father is so distrusting of outsiders, and why Nazriya’s father is so worried well-nigh her marrying into a family that will fathom her (her sister married for love and struggles with her in-laws). And also, in the end-end-end, everyone agrees that the kids should just get married considering they love each other and nothing else matters, plane infertility.

But really, infertility is no one’s merchantry but the couple! And your children are increasingly than just their worthiness to have increasingly children. And young people in unstipulated are increasingly than their worthiness to get married and have kids. That’s the end point of the movie, and a very good point it is, but it is a bit watered lanugo by the preceding 3 hours which winnow this premise as valid.

That’s why I would be interested to see this same mucosa take place in America, or some other fish-out-of-water type of setting. If we had the couples somewhere where literally the unshortened world thinks their family way of life is bonkers, then the message would unmistakably be well-nigh “I want to make my parents happy” not “I superintendency well-nigh society and what people think”. In fact, the opposite, it would be “I don’t superintendency that society thinks my family is insane, I want to make them happy anyway”. I think it would be a stronger largest film, with the theme unmistakably defined, if it was removed from the cozy Telugu family mucosa setting, well-constructed with nosey relatives and family priests and all that. If it’s well-nigh the families, make it well-nigh the families, not Society.