Sapta Sagaralu Dhaati (Side B) Review

Sapta Saagaralu Dhaati - Side A, the first part of the bluesy Kannada romantic drama that became a sleeper hit earlier this year, comes back with the conclusion, "Side B". Young lovers Manu (Rakshit Shetty) and Priya (Rukmini Vasanth) are forced apart when Manu is sentenced to ten years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, and Priya is forced to move on and marry someone else. Side B picks up when Manu is released from jail. He has grown chubbier, his hair is cropped and he wears the forlorn face of a Romeo. Priya is by now the mother of a young boy, working in a department store as a sales girl, and living a lower-middle class life. So what has become of her dream of life by the sea? In a home when the sun shines in through the windows? A place where the fish jump right out of the tap and into your bucket?

Side A showed us the beautiful, poetic side of unconditional love. Side B is its darker face - the depths of sacrifice it demands, the insanity it begets. Manu decides to live out the rest of his life inside Priya's fantasies - move to Mangalore and live by the beach. He still carries a scratchy recording of Priya's voice, and a crumpled picture of the seaside to keep him going. Before he leaves, he wants to see her one last time. But what he sees shocks him: Priya is living a life of drudgery. Her husband runs a dilapidated restaurant. Her house is a suffocating den of pots and pans and other junk. And she has stopped singing.

Secretly and from afar, Manu begins to fix her life. He breaks into her house and repairs her leaky faucet, he cuts a hole through the billboard blocking the morning light into her kitchen, he fixes her Scooty, and he feeds the dog terrorizing her on her way to work. Without Priya ever realising who her benefactor is, her life gets better.

But Side B also shows us first-hand where Manu's obsessive love can take him - and it takes him to some very dark places. Having spent a decade in prison, Manu has become violent, capable of even killing. When his brutish nature comes in contact with his love with Priya, it becomes an obsession that leaves behind a wake of destruction and misery. Take for instance Manu's "girlfriend", Surabhi (Chaitra Achar). She is a prostitute that he solicits but slowly becomes close to. All the while, though, he is imagining her to be Priya, or trying to fill the void she has left behind. Then, there is Manu's old prison nemesis, Soma, who he needlessly provokes into a violent altercation. It is clear that as beautiful as Manu's unchanging love for Priya is, it has a toxicity that clouds his mind. In Manu's world, love is all sacrifice and compromises, without a moment of true bliss. Moving on is not a real option.

Apart from its extreme take on love, the other disappointment in Side B is its screenplay. Unfocused and haphazard, it jumps from one place to the other, or lingers for too long at story points that are already far too obvious. Some promising themes are only half-explored. For instance, the great class divide that lets Manu's employer to take advantage of him, buy him off and then abandon him in prison is never given its due in the story. It is instead all about Manu's single-minded obsession with Priya. What began as Manu-Priya's love in Side A is now told almost entirely from Manu's side. And along the way, all the wholesome goodness of their young love is all but gone.

Rakshit Shetty's Manu is the focus of the Side B. Most times however he is far too sad and puppy-eyed to make you believe that the same person could ever be capable of violence. Rukmini Vasanth, portraying Priya, remains just as captivating as she is in Side A, although we see far less of her now. Chaithra Achar who plays Surabhi brings the right cheerfulness, humour and emotion to soften Manu's raw edges. Gopal Deshpande who plays Manu's exasperated friend is the surprise element of the film. He brings humour and sarcasm to scenes with as little as a facial movement or a snarky comment.

Sapta's background score is indispensable to the film's moods. Without its soft notes, it would be hard to imagine the movie having as much emotional impact as it does.

It is likely that after watching Side A you will come with expectations on how Side B brings Manu and Priya back together. But Side B subverts those expectations, and not always in good ways. Without the two-sided love between Manu and Priya, Side B is tonally very different from Side A. Gone are the cherry blossoms, sunlit rooms and love songs. They are instead replaced by dank permit rooms, dingy warehouses and broken train cars. Indeed, Side B is what happens when extreme, obsessive, self-sacrificial facets of love reach their inevitable conclusion.