Bethlehem Kudumba Unit (Malayalam) has been a box-office sensation. The romantic comedy film stars Nivin Pauly and Mamitha Baiju as the lead pair in an age-gap romance context. The age difference between the duo is a good 12 years.
The Telugu audience who have watched BKU are asking just one question: Why don't our filmmakers come up with such tales? The surface-level answer would be that our viewers are so obsessed with mass entertainers and actioners that there is no market for coming-of-age/sublime romances. We expect Tamil and Malayalam industries to treat us to the best sort of love stories (Kollywood has stopped doing that, by the way).
A deeper look suggests something else. Our filmmakers are culturally attuned to narrating easy-going and safe stories in which the love birds don't have an inner life. This is probably because the reading culture and cultural self-awareness are not deep among the Telugus. We chase glamour, because of which we import non-Telugu speaking actresses; this one casting choice alone has the potential to kill whole scenes. You write complex roles and risk being labelled dull by the producers themselves.
In BKU, Mamitha's character comes with her own everyday and regular problems; our filmmakers don't write slice-of-life situations because they find them boring. Even the academic failures of the lead man are mined for soulless comedy in our movies. Sekhar Kammula's Happy Days pushed the envelope in terms of writing strong pay-offs for regular college-going characters (especially that of Nikhil Siddhartha). Little Hearts featured two youngsters who grappled with EAMCET. Such kind of writing is extremely rare to come by in Telugu cinema.
There is no alternative to observing life, reading novels with serious themes, and talking with people with a wide range of experiences. Telugu filmmakers don't do that. Is the male lead unemployable? Toy with his shallow character for two hours and then show him achieving a turnaround in life because of a rare talent that he possesses. The female lead is a beauty without brains, ever-so-ready to fall for two well-strung sentences uttered by her man. This is the level at which our filmmakers think.
This is not to say that Tollywood has been entirely hopeless. Ante Sundaraniki was profound (and it was rejected roundly by the audience). Oohalu Gusagusalade and Fidaa were made with solid sensibilities. Baby was bold, but it featured cinematic incidents in the final act. One just hopes filmmakers like Aditya Hasan (EPIC - First Semester), Sai Marthand (Little Hearts), and a few more youngsters are going to surprise on the upside.
