Maha Review

Just look around you. 7 out of every 8 persons you see have failed in love. Even the 8th has, but we at fullhyd.com try to present an optimistic picture of the world. So do people want to go to a movie theater to see one more in great detail? Looks like they do, given the number of tragedies that seem to become hits.

To be fair, Maha is a well-made movie. Except that it doesn’t entertain you or anything. If you are sure that you want to just appreciate some innovative film-making and not necessarily get entertained, then you can just watch the Motorola ads on TV – it’s much cheaper, and they only show you weird models, not weird heroes.

Yes, Maha’s hero is characterised by his weird outlook on true love – he works all through the film not to gain his love, but to help her gain her crush, who doesn’t even know her. While Arya dealt with this too, at least Arya was a movie targeted at entertaining you, where the hero won in the end. Maha is a 100% sob-story, with its hero succeeding in getting his girl married off finally without her ever knowing that he is in love with her, and then receding into the countryside where he came from.

Perhaps there is such a thing as true love where you only care for your lover’s interests even if you have to live with a broken heart. Just keep it away from the movie theaters – we go there to escape from our own lives and dream of our future. Or at least flash a statutory warning: “When you leave the theater, you’ll be weeping, or at least feel conned.”

Mano (Bharat) falls in love with Jothi (Mallika Kapoor), who comes to his village near Ooty for an NCC trip. He traces her to Vizag, where he realizes that she is deeply in love with Prem (Arun Kumar), an accomplished cricker, cum industrialist. He is heart-broken, but he decides that true love is all about making the person you love get what she wants, and so stages an elaborate hoax to help Jothi get Prem.

Prem is in love with Nandini (Deepu), a TV anchor, and Jothi is depressed by that. Mano introduces himself to her as Nandini’s ex who she dumped for Prem, and tells Jothi that if they work together, they can break up Prem and Nandini, and then she can get Prem and he can get Nandini. So they scheme, and film is all about how they first get Prem and Nandini to break up, and how Mano then gets Prem to fall in love with Jothi and gets them married.

The film takes the moral high-ground on making Jothi unite with her love, but you are wondering if it isn’t wrong to break up two lovers (Prem and Nandini). To give the girl he loves what she desires, Mano has no qualms about destroying the love of two others. It’s unlikely the audiences are going to bother with this – what they will bother about is an overdose of tragedies from Bharat coming their way. After Premiste, it’s now Maha.

The performances by the lead pair are brilliant – Bharat portrays a heart-broken lover so authentically, you wonder if he’s gone through one. Remember, the 8th guy has also failed in love. Mallika as a bubbly young girl wearing her emotions on her sleeve is quite lovable, and she looks quite good in her teenagers’ attire, too. All performances are good.

The music by Yuvan Raja has some innovative tracks. The dubbing (this is a Tamil film) is passable, but there is too much Tamil script all over the place – our neighbours down south are taking Telugu audiences more for granted with each passing film, doing lesser and lesser cleaning up.

If you do not have a broken heart yet, this film will give you one. Watch it only if you love tragedies.