Samajavaragamana Review

In Samajavaragamana, comedy is a matter of flipping the script on familiar tropes. The hero instead of pursuing the heroine attempts to sister-zone her. The traditional father-son dynamic is inverted - the son fusses over the household while the father is under his thumb. Such parodical relationships turn conventions upside-down and make Samajavaragamana a solid, albeit average, laugh factory.

Protagonist Balu (Sreevishnu of Brochevarevarura fame) has given up on love since an embarrassing incident during college. His new thing is to treat all women as his sisters - especially the ones that show any interest in him. Even Sarayu (Reba John), the pretty paying guest living in his house, can't shake him loose. When she confesses her love for him, Balu threatens her by dangling a rakhi in her face. The script spares no family drama/romance clichés from getting ripped apart in its funhouse blender - or at least it so appears in the movie's charmingly funny first hour.

Adding to the movie's quirkiness is Balu's relationship with his father (Naresh). The old man is still trying to pass his degree exams, thanks to a stipulation in his father's will. While Balu works at a movie theatre, pinching pennies and balancing the household budget, his father throws tantrums at the dining table, and slacks off on his studies. To exaggerate their inverted roles, the story has Naresh sport a wig with a mushroom cut, and a Hitler mustache, and parades him around the house like a restless child, in T-shirts adorned with dad jokes.

Even though this carefree-dad, mature-son setup is totally contrived, Naresh and Sreevishnu give it everything they've got, and the result is one of the most unexpectedly fun pairings of recent comedies.

But Samajavaragamana starts to lose steam in the second half when the story looks for ways to tie off all the dangling plot threads, leading to a worn-out resolution: a secret backstory that only some forgotten grandma knew about and reveals at the very last moment.

Vennela Kishore gets insulted with yet another outrageous cameo (I'm thinking of Macherla Niyojakavargam where I compared his character to a whoopie cushion). He plays a casteist local politician who rattles off one cringe-filled joke after another. Also, his character is named Kula Sekhar.

The movie also fails to wholeheartedly commit to the actors' individual strengths. Sreevishnu is skilled at rolling lines off his tongue with the glibness of an auctioneer - as he does in this one scintillating rant against romance. Yet the script also demands that he do a song-and-dance with the heroine in some or the other Omani desert. Unnecessary? Absolutely.

By the end, Balu's character gets distorted into a patsy, and the jokes get stale and frankly, a bit cowardly (for instance, a wordplay on "caste" and "casting couch" - yeesh!). And the movie that set off as a joyride descends back into the platform, subdued.