Band Melam, produced by Kavya and Shravya, was released in theatres today. In this section, we are going to review the latest BO release.
Plot:
The story is set in a Telangana village where Giri (Harsh Roshan) and Raaji (Sridevi) are cousins. Separated by class differences, they are united by their innocent love for each other as children. Everything falls apart when Raaji climbs up the academic ladder, leaving an immature, noisy Giri behind. Five years later, Giri is heartbroken to learn about one of Raaji's shocking decisions. Raaji's status-conscious father Sayanna (Sai Kumar) has a role in their love story.
Post-Mortem:
Band Melam is the kind of film that thinks a silly shocker delivered by an adult will feel heart-touching when done by a teen. Writer-director Sathish Javvaji's love story revolves around a young male who never stops blabbering around his friends, and a young female who never starts talking around the one person she moved closely with in school days.
Band Melam is as much a buddy comedy as it is a love story. Giri is an aspiring musician whose unrefined friends conveniently complement his creativity. Apparently, he can set out in the music field with a viral tune, but somehow can't figure out how to talk without annoying others for two straight minutes. The tone of conversations among the friends is consistently frivolous. It is as if they are incapable of interiority and personality. Giri is deliberately absurd. Even the silliest teens know how to pretend maturity in serious situations. He, however, is in a constant clown mode, accompanied by his 'chillar' friends (one of whom is a nervous-looking girl in her early 20s or thereabouts).
In the first half, Giri's mission is to pool a certain amount of money through totally impractical means. His clownish friends soldier on with him in an absurd turn of events. In the second, they embark on an even more hare-brained mission.
Time and again, the film's central purpose is to showcase Giri's rank inability to comprehend the obvious. And this is what keeps his love life from being fleshed out. Many village-based films have this supposedly lovable male lead who begs for the audience's sympathy in the final 20 minutes after having a blast, aimlessly and pointlessly, for the first 120 minutes. This rustic artefact is an exhibition piece that the urban audience is supposed to fall in love with as his full-on buffoonery is paraded for two hours. And since he has to achieve something in life, he has a special talent - music, in this case.
Sai Kumar plays an absentee father. He doesn't tolerate his daughter's proximity to Giri when she is barely 5 years old. Once she hits puberty, though, he is blind to her growing closeness to him. The male lead's father looks like someone who is eager to go bankrupt.
Vijai Bulganin's music doesn't deliver the intended energy due to stilted picturization. The performances are over-the-top for the most part. Harsh Roshan is good in the emotional scenes; however, he punches above his weight in the comedy segments (which, unfortunately, go on and on). Sridevi Appala, his Court co-star, is charmless (sorry, but love stories angling for moist eyes need better casting).
Closing Remarks:
Band Melam is a tedious exercise in village-innocence tropes that mistakes loud, aimless clowning for genuine heart.
