Anni Manchi Sakunamule Review

Babies switched at birth, court battles over lush coffee estates. These are scenarios foreign to an ordinary Telugu family, and not everyone may resonate with the conflicts that make up Anni Manchi Sakunamule. So the first order of business for showrunner Nandini Reddy is to bring warmth and Telugu flavour into her latest, a movie whose premise and backdrop - an idyllic hill station named Victoriapuram, where one of the protagonists runs a cutesy bakery - may appear somewhat detached from the usual middle-class problems of the typical Telugu family entertainer.

But Reddy imbues that everyday Telugudanam with plenty of wholesome comedy beats and eccentric characters, and several wedding functions where elderly folks let loose on the dance floor - the stuff of comforting dramas. All the while, though, the central conflict is on a low boil.

The central conflict of Anni Manchi Sakunamule is a protracted court battle over the ownership of a coffee estate - a feud that patriarchs Prasad (Rajendra Prasad) and Diwakar (Rao Ramesh) are locked in. Like an heirloom passed through generations, their families have each inherited a hatred for the other, and in Diwakar's case, the antagonism is so all-consuming that he rejects marriage and children to put all his energies into winning the fight.

Although there are no overt references to a God-like figure (the kind we saw in Nandini Reddy's last blockbuster movie, Oh! Baby), there is a dazzlingly divine coincidence in which the heirs of these two bickering families are swapped at birth. Diwakar's brother (Naresh) picks up Prasad's daughter, and Prasad gets his enemy's son. Oops!

Of course, nobody except the panicked delivery doctor (Urvashi) realizes this fiasco, but it is already too late - the babies have bonded, nursed and been fussed over - and so they grow up in the wrong house with the wrong parent, as Rishi (Santosh Shoban) and Arya (Malavika Nair), the best of friends, until teenage hormones complicate their relationship.

Keeping the real issues to the fringes, the movie languishes in a long stretch of frothy feel-good moments and a light romance explored through a cast of caricatures, each with their assigned quirks: Prasad, with his superstitious beliefs and irksome disposition; Diwakar, with his irreverent drunkness; Arya, who is ambitious to a fault; and Rishi - her total opposite - easygoing to a fault. There are several wedding dance sequences, and bits of harmless Telangana vs Andhra rivalry about whose food deserves its place at the wedding feast ("mukka padakunda muddha digadhu", the Telangana side of a wedding party says rather crassly).

While everyone is having a jolly time, engaged in shallow taunts and fights, the years fly by to where Arya and Rishi grow up to do the most embarrassingly millennial jobs - she is a coffee entrepreneur, he is a food vlogger. Anni Manchi Sakunamule's unwillingness to engage with its own premise is plainly obvious. An early scene, powerful at establishing the degenerating effect that this multi-generational fight has had on the two families, is nearly forgotten until it gets a callback in the film's emotional coda. There is a growing discomfort that the central conflicts don't seem to be remotely close to being resolved - there is always time for yet another wedding dance, for yet another lover's spat.

Anni Manchi Sakunamule had all the ingredients to make something memorable. It has an unquestionably good cast - Malavika Nair is magnetic, Santosh Shoban emits sparks of brilliance, Rao Ramesh just kills it in the finale, and Gauthami who plays Rishi's partially deaf mother is a comedic revelation. The setting and cinematography are stunning (the movie was largely shot in Connoor). Mickey J Meyer's stirring music, particularly the title track, remains in your head long after the movie. And director Nandini Reddy is completely up to the task of extracting performances from seasoned actors ('Sahukar' Janaki plays a droll grandma and looks to be having a lot of fun doing it), and skillfully corralling large groups of people on screen. But with a meandering script and tiresome tangents, the film feels just like a real family - both comforting and tedious - and falls just shy of being a good summer family outing.