Thandel Review

Chandoo Mondeti's story may begin humbly in a fishing hamlet in Srikakulam district where a young girl, Satya (Sai Pallavi), waits atop a lighthouse for the safe return of her lover from his months-long fishing expeditions in the Arabian waters off Gujarat. But in a feat of narrative pole vaulting, the film finds itself in a Karachi jail cell where Satya's lover, Raju (Naga Chaitanya), and his group of fishermen have been imprisoned for accidentally sailing into Pakistani waters.

What starts off as a Shakespearean romantic drama about separated lovers becomes a chest-thumping film in which the Indian flag is raised inside a Pakistani jail in retaliation to Pakistanis pulling down their pants to piss on an Indian iconography. Mondeti may be aiming for patriotism, but what comes out is so patronizing and reductive that the film often feels like an all-out farce.

There is an insufferable quality to Satya and Raju's romance, weighed down by their grand proclamations of love, teary farewells and naive ultimatums. We watch them run hand-in-hand on the beach madly in love, fall asleep in embrace, and stare into each other's eyes over Devi Sri Prasad's crooniest numbers ad nauseum. When one of them asks, "Wouldn't you miss me when you're gone?" the moment carries all the romance of stumbling upon young lovers in a public park - you can't help but instinctively look away and roll your eyes.

Blame it on the film's repetitive and unfocused narrative, but even Sai Pallavi - so reliably compelling in melodramas - feels maudlin here. In some ways, Satya echoes Pallavi's recent role in Amaran as the long-suffering army wife who lives in constant fear for her husband's life. Like her, Satya dreads that Raju may never return from one of his expeditions. But instead of empathy, we feel increasingly annoyed and impatient as Satya devolves into a puddle of tears in every other scene.

Naga Chaitanya is lost amid the roiling emotionality of Sai Pallavi's over-authentic performance. Smeared in brown-face and clothed in banians, he still looks and acts hopelessly urbane standing above the fray of the other fishermen. When he calls Satya "bujji thalli" (about a thousand times over the course of the film) in a Srikakulam accent that is so grating, you can hear the trolling memes practically mint themselves.

Mondeti is a filmmaker unafraid to infuse his ideologies into his films with the brightest primary colours, leaving little room for subtlety or nuance. His Karthikeya series carried similarly jingoistic rhetoric, but at least it delivered as a plot-driven entertainer with stunning cinematography. Thandel, however, carries a streak of condescension that's hard to overlook.

Amid a schmaltzy love story that never truly resolves its central conflict, the film finds time for a speech on taking pride in one's accent, a PSA on the importance of having an Aadhaar card, a pointed use of Article 370 to take jabs at Pakistan, and an ode to Sushma Swaraj's foreign policy legacy. The muddled narrative oscillates between the hero's and heroine's perspectives, recycling the same handful of visual motifs - romance and heroism - where the girl pines and the boy fights. But if one pays any attention at all, one can easily uncover its emotionally exploitative tricks.