Prema Chadarangam Review

Everyone knows that Sigmund Freud invented the Oedipus Complex. For those to whom it's new, the Oedipus Complex is about some kind of love, or something broadly along those lines. It is observed mostly when it exists, it has 14 letters totally, and it works both before and after a zebra crossing. It is a user-friendly concept, since it doesn't require much understanding to either write about it or to make movies about it. Indeed, that is Freud's greatest gift to mankind - concepts that would make you look intellectual if you did just anything with them.

The makers of Prema Chadarangam forget the most important rules of movie-making in this genre - deep characterization, exceptionally good performances and taut story-telling. Prema Chadarangam has none. So what you have finally is a movie that just has a script, and tries to gloat in it.

Raghu (Vishal), an Income Tax Officer, runs into Mythili (Reema Sen) on a routine raid, who asks him to strap up her innerwear thinking it's her mother. Unable to believe his luck, yet torn by loyalty to his profession, Raghu does the most practical thing - he decides to strap up her innerwear. Well, Mythili wakes up in time, but she still can't stop him from eve-teasing her, from imagining raunchy duets with her, from shopping for bras for her, and from eating up the entire first half of the film without coming anywhere near the actual story.

Raghu finally floors and marries her. But someone does not like all this at all. That is, aside of all the audience who got lured into this thinking it's a semi-porn flick and haven't seen one bit of XXX action yet. Raghu has an unlikely nemesis in Viswa (Bharat), a teenager 6 years younger to her that Mythili raised all through childhood into adolescence like a mother. Only, Viswa cannot think of Mythili in a motherly way. The way she's dressing, nobody in the audience can, either, so you can't completely blame him.

Viswa drugs and kidnaps Mythili when Raghu is out of town, and the rest of the movie is a tale of his skill in plotting against her rescue, Raghu's skill in rescuing her, and your skill in surviving till the end.

The early part of the film snitches points due to several light-hearted moments, especially through Raghu's caricature of a colleague played by Vivek and dubbed by Venu Madhav. But then the film careens into pace lapses, genre clichés, technical unsophistry and plain unimaginativeness in the combat of wits. There is none of the urgency that a psycho-thriller would propel you into the next scene with. The attempt to portray Viswa as insidiously ruthless and simultaneously vulnerable fails due to the choice of the actor - this role requires high theatrical cadence, but Bharat is just an average actor.

The performances are all average, and the film can't scrub the B-grade stamp off itself. And why do people enter it looking forward to some porn? The lower stalls were full, and the balcony was empty, in the anchor theater, Sandhya 35mm.