Pelli Roju

In a weekend, where Telugu films fought with each other to have a release, a dubbed film, Pelli Roju, Oru Naal Koothu in Tamil, also released. Can it entertain us with another dubbed film, 2.0 in theatres? Is it worthy of our time?

Plot:

On an eventful day, which happens to be marriage day of Kavya (Nivetha Pethuraj), lives of Raj (Dinesh), RJ Susheela (Riythvika), RJ Suresh (Ramesh Tilak), Lakshmi (Miya George) change all off a sudden with one incident.

Kavya is in love with her colleague Raj but him being from different caste and lower income class becomes a problem for Raj. Kavya’s father too doesn’t approve it much but leaves it to his daughter’s choice.

RJ Susheela is looking to get married from past 5 years but due to her job and color, she doesn’t get a good groom. She does find one Bhaskar (Lingesh) but then he is too confused to marry her or not. She breaks their engagement and falls in love with RJ Suresh, her colleague. Suresh attends the marriage to talk to his parents about his marriage with Susheela.

Lakshmi decides to elope with a person who likes her during one of the marriage-related talks as her father doesn’t look to get her married soon and waits for a perfect match of his liking. She at one time even accepts an old man.

How these people’s lives change on Kavya’s marriage day is the story!

Performances:

Dinesh, Nivetha Pethuraj, Miya George, Rythvika, Ramesh Thilak, Lingesh are good in their characters. Nivetha impresses us more than others. Miya is good too.

Dinesh looks a tad caricaturish in his approach and seems like holding it back too much when some more expressiveness is desired. All others are adequate.

Technicalities:

Justin Prabhakaran composed music for the film. He did a fine job with songs and BGM is well suited. But he does tend to dominate the dialogue with his score at times and that should have been avoided.

Gokul Benoy’s visuals are good but he doesn’t come up with a distinctive approach to colors at different places and that makes every place seem dull and gloomy. Maybe a narrative choice but could have gone with a better choice that elevates the story and differentiates well enough between characters. The make-up team seems to have been asked to tan the lead actresses to match male leads!

V J Sabu Joseph as an editor tried hard to not confuse the audiences with a complex narrative. But he did not care about the sequences that are dragging too much for the effect. He should have addressed some patterns as well once again as the overall punch seems missing.

Sankar Dass wrote the movie along with director Nelson. His script seems to work when we take each character out individually and discuss their story. But he lacks in coherence as the endings don’t really pay off the entire character arcs. They should have been even more convincing and strong.

Nelson Venkatesan the director and writer should have concentrated on the overall impact and how some characters story doesn’t really fit in when we look at the climax and options he took. It just feels like for a twist he decided to use the incident and wanted to somehow bring all these stories under one roof than each one complimenting another. He should have worked on pacing issue with his editor as well.

Analysis:

As a film, Pelli Roju fails in leaving an aftertaste that twist endings of K. Balachander used to do. The master used to really work on the characters for us to feel the weight of the proceedings and also think that in a weird way the entire scenario does come to a satisfactory ending, even though one may have chosen another one over what he did.

Such strength in writing is missing from Nelson’s film as he keeps taking inspiration from Balachander films to deliver the roller-coaster ride of emotions. Had he worked out on the entire impact of the story he could have delivered a much much better film. Still a better film for this mild weekend.

Rating: 2/5