Aha has been trying to capture the OTT regional market space in Telugu. Their biggest attempt at grabbing eye-balls is Colour Photo. One can term this film as such because they encouraged a very talented young team to come up with right goods to make a film. With OTT space backing them the team did not fear about making a tragedy, one can say so. Let’s see how the young team performed with Colour Photo their big opportunity.
Story: Colour Photo story is about a Black skin Boy, Jayakrishna (Suhass) falling deeply in love with white skinned girl, Deepthi Indukuri (Chandini Chowdary). They both study in same college in Machilipatnam. Ramaraju (Sunil) doesn’t encourage their union. He is the brother of Deepthi. What happens next? You can guess easily!
Performances: Suhass has good voice. He needs to learn to emote better in important scenes. As a supporting lead he can come-on screen with a good line or punch line to win the moment. But as a lead, he has to be able to carry many moments and he needs to add some more levels to his performing capabilities.
Chandini Chowdary made the film her platform to showcase what she can add to a film as an actress. She has a very good potential to be a good performer and looks to attract many young audiences.
Somehow Sunil as a performer seems to be trying too hard when he is playing a negative role. Being “serious” doesn’t seem to come to him naturally. He has to work on it. Harsha Chemudu scored better than all others. There is nothing much to talk about other actors.
Technicalities: Music by Kaalabhairava is good and BGM is good too. Cinematography is technically sound but the frames missed liveliness.
Writer Sai Rajesh Neelam tried to make a very “serious” film on racial discrimination adding financial disparity to it. But he picked up characters that don’t really flair up like in Pariyerum Perumal. They tried to match it but the writing did not have such depth to really haunt us.
Sandeep Raj as a dialogue writer proved himself in Youtube videos but here he had to come up with an engaging screenplay while directing the “heavy” subject well enough. He just wanted to follow Tamil films and Malayalam films style neglecting the depth part. We don’t feel for the characters much and as we know the ending, we just watch the film, if you somehow have to.
Analysis: When we see films like Mynaa, Subramanyapuram, Paruthi Veeran, Premisthe and hear to Heer-Ranjha, Romeo-Juliet, we feel like repeating the feat. We would love to make a romance that has comedy, realistic setting, likeable characters and more importantly the “young and fresh” flavour. Colour Photo had good music, fine performances but it lacked in the overall construction. It missed the connecting factor with audiences while every other thing fell in place. Young team tried to get the authenticity right and make the film heavy at the same time as light as they can. But that experiment did not flourish. Film looks like a forced tragedy than an organic one like Premisthe. Every character seems to be indicating that the tragedy did affect them in the start but by the end, the heaviness doesn’t work with the viewers.
This film tries to tell us a story of a young guy who died for no mistake of his. But then when he dies you don’t feel that circumstances have killed him. Other films listed above got that right but here we miss the feeling towards the main character. Sunil tried his best to be the baddie but the character has been written very poorly. On the whole, young team tried their best but faltered more than they should have.
Bottom Line: Heavy Ending spoils the fun!
Rating: 2.5/5
