Pareshan Review

Here is the punchline: Pareshan is a riot. I don't just mean that it'll make you smile and titter. No, you will cackle, keel over, slap your thigh, and maybe even find yourself laughing so hard that you even cry a little.

But here is also the other, cooler thing about Pareshan: if you asked me to repeat one of its jokes, I would utterly fail at making them sound funny. Instead, I'd say, "You just had to be there."

Because, what is inherently funny about the line "Meere edo okati cheyyali doctor"? Yet, when Thiruveer, playing the protagonist Isaac, says these words, wearing a forlorn face inside a doctor's office, the audience erupts in ripples of laughter. His comedic timing is not just impeccable, it is everything in that scene. By recreating these flashes of brilliance over and over again, Pareshan becomes one of the year's best comedies.

From the very beginning, Pareshan is clear that it is not trying to be grand. It is about a small-town boy's typical problems, and really nothing more. Isaac's biggest sources of "pareshan" are the people closest to him: his parents, friends, and girlfriend Sirisha (Pavani Karanam). In a moment of impulsive generosity, Isaac lends his father's money to his friends, and he is now unable to recoup it. In another moment of, let's again call it "impulsive generosity", he gets his girlfriend pregnant, and must now find a doctor to quietly take care of the matter ("meere edo okati cheyyali, doctor"). Meanwhile, his father, a coal miner and a devout Christian, is on his case to get him "settled down". Trying to claw his way out of his problems, Isaac is constantly chasing down someone, or being chased; beating up somebody, or getting beaten; yelling, or crying into his phone.

Pareshan's showrunner Rupak Ronaldson balances all this mayhem on a razor's edge. Had the story tilted too much to the left, it would have become a raft of soulless punchlines (I'm looking at you, Anudeep K V). A bit too much to the right and it may have lost its comedic charisma. Instead, it is both stupendously funny and stupendously sad at the same time - like life itself.

Take the scene in which Isaac and Sirisha go from clinic to clinic searching for a doctor to consult about Sirisha's probable pregnancy. A defeated Isaac says, "Why are there no female doctors in this damn place?", a snide remark, but also a revelation. Pareshan is stacked with many such layered scenes which on the surface seem amusing but also hint at the dark reality of its characters' lives.

For example, an extended joke about one of Isaac's friends Satti, who can't sell his property because of a missing thumb, is also a comment on Satti's illiterateness. In another scene, Isaac's friends are day-drinking, but without the romantic backdrop of lush palm trees. Instead, they lie sprawled on a desiccated patch of earth, that bears the harsh evidence of an ongoing drought.

Drinking is a persistent theme in Pareshan. The first few times that Isaac and his friends pop open bottles and drink like animals, it feels eccentric. By the fifth or sixth time, it is uncomfortable to watch, just too much.

Rupak, who grew up in Mancherial, the same town the movie is set in, and whose father was also a coal miner, clearly wants to convey some discomfiting truths about life in certain places. And I think that if you chose to watch this distorted version of Pareshan, all you have to do is bar yourself from laughing to discover the story in which the village youngsters, jobless and seething with misplaced passion, spend all their parents' money on cheap beer and waste away their lives. If rootedness is about evoking a specific place and its people - warts and all - Pareshan is one of the most rooted films of recent times.

Pareshan is served immensely well by its dogged pursuit of authenticity. And nowhere does this pay off better than with its supporting cast of Isaac's friends, all local actors who curate their roles into instantly recognizable characters. Vanaparthi Arjun Krishna who plays Satti is phenomenal as an anxious, love-failure case. And if the ability to evoke laughter was the only gauge by which I judged the cast, Arjun would win by a mile, eclipsing even the lead Thiruveer. Thiruveer himself displays an uncanny talent for comedy, and he knocks it out of the park yet again, right on the heels of his last sleeper hit Masooda.

Yashwanth Nag's soundtrack perhaps deserves a paean of its own, given how distinct and remarkable it is. It's got bite. And it heightens the experience of the movie manifold. "Sau Sara", which remixes baaraath band beats, is a wacky banger. "Atharu Batharu" is an impossible mix of genres, an exemplar of Nag and his band Chowrastha's blending styles.

Much as I enjoyed the movie, I did have some niggles, particularly in the first half when the word "random" came to mind. The screenplay takes some time to settle down and focus. There is a silly parody about a singing pastor. There are one too many chase scenes that feel like watching a passel of territorial street dogs bark and bite at rival gangs. But Pareshan gets into its groove by the second half, and finally ends on a note that is startlingly self-aware and poignant.