Agent Sai Srinvasa Athreya
Exposition is the bane of visual medium - where something needs to be told as against being shown - and no where is the burden of it more felt in the two genres of sci-fi and mystery thrillers. While film makers tend to handle exposition like a hot potato, dispensing of it at the earliest possible opportunity, there are some places where the narration would (has to) come to a screeching halt, as the much valuable screentime is expended simply at explaining things. The current golden boy of Hollywood, Christopher Nolan, is accused of being weighted down by the exposition so much so that his movies are often thought (derided) to work well more as radio dramas than as motion pictures. It is a Catch-22 situation, the more complex the idea, the more explanation is needed and the more the movie explains itself, it almost appears to be sheepishly apologizing for it. The concept of Batman, the science of Interstellar, the ruse of The Prestige, the Matryoshka Doll game that was Inception - all these ideas are not simple straightforward ones to start with. And each of the ideas had to be explained, drilled and driven home to the minutest detail to nicely setup the subsequent proceedings on the screen. There is no right way of handling exposition. If the entire premise of the movie is hinged upon a complex web of rules, how else can a film maker get around it without having out point out the connections, the inter-relationship among the various entities all adding up to the final reveal that is hopelessly balanced atop the hosue of the cards. The only thing he can hope for is for the rest of the proceedings to balance out this indispensable aspect of the narrtion. Exposition - damned if you do, damned if you don't!

Aatreya is a small time detective caught up in a complex web of greed, collusion and conspiracy. The juxtaposition is nicely setup there, his small town sensibilities tackling a big ticket crime. The events surrounding the conspiracy, as indicated in the end titles, are straight out of the headlines. No contention with the intention there! Had the mystery been a figment of imagination of the writer's fertile mind, he would have been wrapped on the knuckles with a ruler for being over indulgent. But since the core idea is really real, the writer was left with two choices, either accept the mystery as is and have the detective stumble towards the truth by the way of never ending exposotion or take the kernel of the mystery - organ harvesting - and weave his own yarn around it cutting out the tedious details and unnecessary misdirections...and at that important fork the writer chooses the road less traveled, goes for the first option and consequently gets stuck in the swamp. (If the road was indeed less traveled, there must be a valid reason for it, Frost's indubitable optimism, like Aatreya's, notwithstanding!). This single decision pulls down "Agent Sai Srinivasa Aathreya" from certified greatness to merely noble effort, as there is so much to love here, at least in the first half, the zany sense of humor, the fine balancing act of the tone between farce and realism (ala Peter Seller's Pink Panther), the sparkling writing and above all, the tour de force performance of Naveen Polishetty, who singlehandedly holds the movie together. The temptation to stick to the truth, seemingly because it is more potent and stranger than fiction, may not be too good after all, particulary when the said truth has a lot to say....

Dear Comrade
An interesting trivia - Right after the tremendous success in the role of the tragic lover "Devadasu", ANR sought after the secondary hero role as a self anointed sly detective in "Missamma", not just to cleanse his acting palate, but to consciously move away and being typecast in a role that had made him a phenomenon. Quite a brave and wise decision, back in those days when there were no stars just actors, and just an unimaginable feat in the current climate of hyperconscious super inflated image-ry.

Idea:
Dear Comrade is clearly two different movies rough stitched into one. Like the old moral story about a cat presiding over a dispute between two pigeons over a piece of bread, where to balance one side it eats out a little from the other side and vice versa, eventually ending up eating the entire bread by itself, the movie is torn between Devarakonda's new found image post Arjun Reddy and original crux of the story, a lady finding her voice with the able support of her lover. In a bid to boost up (cash in) the image of Devarakonda, the initial idea is pushed so far into the sidelines that by the time it gets to it, the core point becomes an after thought, and what was clearly a supporting role for the 'hero' got blown up so much that his journey takes precedence over the rest of the proceedings. If the decision had indeed been made that the original idea could no longer suit the 'image' of Vijay, enough care should have been taken to making the movie around his journey alone, instead of attaching the heroine's issue as a caboose compartment to a fast chugging train. And to top it all, the postscript at the end of the movie about acknowledgement and empowerment of women in the present day workplace environment sounds hollow at best, and pretentious at worst. It is a bit ironic too that the most pertinent and important female issue had to be sidelined to accommodate the larger male ego in a movie that advocates about equality in workplaces.

Background:
But for the odd Sivakrishna's movies of yesteryears, it is fair to say that no telugu movie has rightly captured the politics of campus arenas, unlike some of its Hindi counterparts. Which is again ironic because the college and university environments are hotbeds of student politics with a multitude of organizations - AISF, PDSU, RSU and the newly minted ABVP - vying for attention for both students' minds as well as the favors of the political bosses whose parties the associations were affiliated to. It is really unclear what the hero character cared for, fought about, stood for and made noise about for much of the movie, other than calling out every other character as Comrade and trying to justify the word with broad generalizations about empathy and camaraderie. Had the writer paid a bit more attention to the happenings in the country, from the JNU episode involving Kanhaiya Kumar to the more local Rohith Vemula episode in University of Hyderabad, from issues like nationalism, casteism, oppression, free speech et al, the politics of Dear Comrade would have been bonafide and heartfelt, instead of merely being a pamphlet, providing lip service to the lofty ideals.

Palette:
What Dear Comrade gets it right is the love story. Riding on the broad shoulders of Devarakonda, the love story appears fresh, thanks in large parts to the setting (three cheers to the location scout), the realistic acting, the crackling chemistry between the lead pair and the beautiful score. The colors, dialed down by a notch, compared to the standard telugu movie palette, and the stellar production design aid to keep the proceedings rooted and genuine.

Interestingly both 'Athreya' and 'Comrade', for different reasons, end up at different places from where they set out to originally. One fell victim to its own grasp and the other, for the lack of it. The potential was clearly there, if only the makers trusted their material a bit more than letting the externalities dictate their fate.

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