Ladies & Gentlemen Review

So the new generation is headed towards certain doom. That is the impression that is conveyed when we see flicks like this. Maruti was the one who'd begun these stories which talk about how technology only corrupts the younger generation, and how sex and money are the only things that drive the youth of today. Director Madhura Sreedhar turns producer with Ladies And Gentlemen, and takes Maruti's filmmaking nous one step further.

The film showcases three parallel stories - one of a college student Krishna Murthy (Chaitanya Krishna), the second of a BPO employee played by Mahat Raghavendra, and a third of a couple played by Kamal Kamaraju and Nikita Narayan.

Chaitanya Krishna is a topper - which in Telugu movie parlance automatically means he's absolutely awkward around girls and is desperate to get himself a girlfriend. He stumbles upon a girl on Facebook one day and falls desperately in love with her. The girl reciprocates and our man is on Cloud Nine.

Mahat earns 15k per month, but spends around ten times that and is in heavy debt. So he resorts to fraud / cybercrime to fund his lavish life.

Kamal owns a software firm and is super-busy, leaving his wife all alone. Nikita gets bored and rekindles her friendship with an old college friend Rahul (Adivi Sesh). This leads to complications in her relationship with her husband.

How all the three stories end in tragedy forms the rest of the movie.

Ladies And Gentlemen begins decently enough. Manjunath, a first-time director, does well in showcasing the easy availability of technology and how it presents an easy escape from the boredom of the real world. The lack of a strong background story for each character does make it slightly difficult for you to empathize with them, but the first half showcases this convincingly enough. However, The second half goes slightly haywire with a couple of completely unnecessary songs and a rapidly wrapped-up tragic conclusion.

The ensemble cast does well, with Chaitanya Krishna and Adivi Sesh standing out. Raghu Kunche provides decent music. But while the numbers in the first half are shot imaginatively, those in the second half are neither well conceived nor well placed. The technical values are all good, and it is nice to see a film that is shot in and around Hyderabad in a controlled budget.

Ladies And Gentlemen is a film with a title that has no relation to the content, a decent first half, and a second half that exists solely to showcase tragedy. It is hard to understand who would want to go to a theatre and come out with their thinking hats on over a theme like this.