Pravarakhyudu Review

Sasi (Jagapathi Babu) has come home from Harvard, and his parents are bride-hunting for him. Unfortunately, the girls he's made to meet hardly impress him. He finds something is missing in life, but doesn't know what. A conversation with his friends reminds him of an old sweetheart - Sailaja (Priyamani).

It's flashback time now. Sailaja is a nice girl who believes in traditional values, love, romance, and coming first in everything she does. She's sometimes headstrong - she insults the men who woo her. Unfortunately, she's sometimes hilarious, too - she thinks men fall for women for their brains.

The outspoken rationalizer Sasi indeed thinks she's funny, and puts her off when he clears some of her misconceptions about life, and tells her that it's her good physique that attracts men, and not her report card. But a few other incidents soon make her fall in love with him. When she realizes that he doesn't love her, her heart breaks, and they part rather unceremoniously.

We're back in the present, where Sasi discovers that Sailaja is still single, and the principal of a women's college. She's the kind who makes her students realize they're very lucky… to be alive - the rules and regulations make the college seem like it's from the time when man discovered that he's no longer a chimp. The rest of the story is about how Sasi romances her.

Sasi is a fascinatingly mature, sober, sorted-out kind of hero. If you ever knew someone like that in college in real life, chances are that you laughed at him endlessly. If you're still laughing at him endlessly, that either means that you're even more sorted-out than he is, or that you're not being allowed to move about without chains.

Pravarakhyudu smashes some ideas we've never thought of letting go. For example, eloquent love letters are not the be-all and end-all of judging the girl/guy who gave them to you. People who really want to die don't make their suicide attempts public spectacles. And ageing heroes in love stories set in colleges don't have to make want to go out to the theatre canteen every 5 minutes.

It is a patiently laid-out movie. The issues it speaks on are real, and the dialogues arrived at with careful reasoning. However, the way the film is wrapped up is pretty mundane, and ruins things for Sasi by making him have to justify his actions by bringing in some Freudian analysis of his childhood fears.

Sasi is a character that women find irresistibly handsome and charming. Jagapathi puts in a balanced performance as always, but he looks old, and we'll leave it at that. Priyamani is crackerjack in her strong role - from a haughty young girl spurned by her lover, to a college principal who denies her love but has to deal with competition for her man from even her students. Even the extras perform well, surprisingly.

Keeravani has used a fair bit of Western classical influences and unconventional tunes in the soundtrack. The songs are refreshing, and are picturized pretty innovatively - and that doesn't just mean there's no cleavage. The movie has been shot well, too.

On the whole, Pravarakhyudu is a decent, healthy flick. It isn't really for family "types" to sit together and watch, because most of its analysis is about romance and sex. It's a one-time watch, but you don't have to cancel that candle-light dinner or that awards function and get here.