Sri Sreemati Satyabhama Review

It takes guts to make a film like Sri Srimati Satyabhama. And S V Krishna Reddy, the renowned director of the Telugu film industry (forget about the producer for the moment), seems to be endowed with the courage to pursue a plot that seems stupid by any standards.

It goes like this: a rich businessman, Ranganath, has a lovely daughter, Vijayashanti, for whose happiness he would do anything, even partake of his riches. And in a fit of emotion he gets all his riches transferred to his brother-in-law Ashok's son, Raghu, on the grounds that Vijayashanti and Raghu would become husband and wife anyway.

His job done, Ranganath dies of heart attack. And the inevitable happens. Ashok throws Vijayashanti and her mother out of the house and packs off Raghu to United States of America.

Fifteen years later, Raghu is back in India and is still proclaiming his love for Vijayashanti. Unable to convince his father, he poisons Vijayashanti and himself. But by a miraculous twist of fate he survives while Vijayashanti dies. Only to surface in New Zealand as Dolly.

Our hero goes to New Zealand to recover from the shock of survival, and promptly falls for Dolly. He convinces her to come to India. She reveals to her uncle that she is the same Satyabhama in disguise. From here to the finish the film is about how Vijayashanti creates nightmarish moments for her tormenter.

Nothing in the film is worth a mention. Vijayashanti is a good actress, but probably it is the problem of the evolution of our audiences and of the script-writers. She's now too big for normal glamour roles aside Telugu heroes, and women-oriented super-heroine roles don't seem to click anymore. You unfortunately can't be a Julia Roberts or a Michelle Pfieffer in ol' Andhra, that kind of scripts are neither there for the offing, nor have a market. This is an outcome of all that. She needs to do roles that portray her as the 'hero' of the movie with the rest of the cast practically rookies, since she can't be a conventional heroine, and the audiences have had enough of that. Even Hema Malini did only one Seetha Aur Geetha.

These folks apparantly spent a couple of crores to give some gloss to the film. On hindsight, it proves to be a waste of precious money. The comedy is stupid, and the performances of other actors leave a lot to be desired. Sri Sreemati Satyabhama is bad. If you don't want to waste your valuable time, keep far away from the theaters.