Sparsa Review

"I used to love her,
But I had to kill her,
She bitched so much,
She drove me nuts,
And now I'm happier this way..."

That's a funny one from GnR and is a rather extreme way of portraying the lady-lead of this one, but while it's all right to feel strongly about something, if you make it the center of your life to the extent that you impose it on all people who are close to you, then it backfires. This movie (at least its heroine) takes a moral stand: that the guilty should be punished. All movies do, but it is this film's heroine's ideal in life, and when the hero feels pressurized to live up to it, there are cracks in their love relationship. Wondering how a theme like this happened in creativity starved Telugu film scripting? It didn't. This is a film dubbed from Kannada.

Sudeep (Sudeep) is an upcoming model whose face is plastered over all the greeting cards - that speaks of his popularity. As he goes to shoot in Coonoor for an ad, he meets Suman (Rekha) by accident. But she has already boarded the train and is on her way to a destination unknown to him. Using his intelligence, he bribes the stationmaster and gets her address. Which happens to be Coonoor itself.

He waits for her to come back, and using his guile and charm, he manages to woo her. Everything goes well for them. But Suman has a policy: she feels that if people commit a mistake they should mend it themselves. If by accident a person happens to even spill their things, she strongly believes that he/she should collect the things and give them back to them.

Sudeep, who likes Suman for what she is, respects her principle too. And it is precisely this, more than anything else, that comes in way of their coming together. For, by a chance of fate, he becomes instrumental in a girl Radha's (Sudha Rani) becoming crippled. Knowing Suman's policy pretty well, Sudeep doesn't tell her about the fatal accident, and keeps evading her. Meanwhile, a lot of melodrama happens in Radha's house, which makes him decide that he should marry Radha and not Suman.

The film is woven into a beautiful love story and the actors play their roles well. Newcomers Rekha and Sudeep give subdued performances, while the experienced Sudharani tends to over-emote, especially in the closing sequence where she gives a long lecture on the purity of love. There is some wonderful photography, and the locales like Coonoor and Ooty, where most of the film is shot, provide the right backdrop for the love story to unfold. There are some good songs to keep the film moving without an iota of boredom. But the second half tends to get unnecessarily mired in melodrama, though the director Sunil Kumar Desai uses his skill to steer the film from the cliched path.

Sparsha is a good film, but for the dubbing. See it if you like simple love stories.