Kitha Kithalu Review

There are 2 ways to tell your kids to cross the road carefully. One is to tell them how being careless can result in getting hit by a truck. The second is to actually get hit by a truck and show them. Kithakithalu is EVV’s way of doing the latter. A movie with a one-line message – that everyone cannot get a wife who looks like a movie heroine – takes over 2 hours and 30 minutes (and with no songs, mind you). When he could have just taken a newspaper ad saying that.

Okay, it can be argued that it’s not the message that is the purpose of the film, but the entertainment in the process. Unfortunately, EVV makes some fundamental errors even in that.

Firstly, the film has no glamour at all – there’s no heroine. Secondly, for most Indian masses, a movie is an escape into a fantasy world where the hero gets the ultimate reward in the end – the beautiful girl. In Kithakithalu, the hero is married to an obese ungainly woman halfway through, and there’s nothing to look forward to either for him or for you thereon. And thirdly, the days of the Rajendra Prasad genre of pure comic capers are gone – you like to watch them at home on TV, not in a movie theater.

Kithakithalu is about a young SI Raja Babu (Aryan Naresh) who has to marry a fat unsightly girl Soundarya (Geeta Singh) totally against his wishes, since his family, enamoured of the wealth of her family, threatens him with mass suicide if he doesn’t. He continuously insults Soundarya for her looks and weight, even though she is the model wife who respects him, is eager to please him, and defends him in front of the world despite everything.

Raja tries to court the beautiful Rambha (Madhu Shalini), who reciprocates his interest initially even though she knows that he is married. But when she finds out that all his wealth belongs to his wife and will go when he divorces her, she dumps him. Raja is then continuously slighted by Soundarya too after he tells her he wants to divorce her, and, faced with complete indifference and taunts from the very woman for whom he was the center of the universe until then, he changes, and wants her back.

The main attraction in the film is the comedy – this one features the entire pantheon of Tollywood’s comic gods, and there’s a fair bit of genuine rib-ticklers. However, the main theme is too much of a reality check to make this work.

Then, the women audiences could have got the men in to make the counters jingle, but then EVV signs off saying that men will be men, and that they can fantasize about the models and heroines but should stick to their wives. Dunno how many women will recommend to others, a film that ends like this. So that’s EVV’s primary forte – the families – going south.

The primary idea behind the film is easy to see – no one else at this time will make films with EVV’s sons, and EVV can only make low-budget family films starring mainly the comic crew. Unfortunately, there seems to be no market for either. This is a film strictly for the B and C centers.