Tag Archives: Rakshit Shetty

Godhi Banna Sadharana Mykattu

Posted on by

GBSM poster

The past few years have seen a number of promising new directors appear in the Kannada film industry and Hemanth Rao is another to add to the list. His début film Godhi Banna Sadharana Mykattu has the benefit of an excellent cast, but the well-written story is beautifully developed and the blend of emotional drama, suspense and humour is perfect. At first glance it may appear rather dark as Anant Nag plays an Alzheimer’s patient who goes missing, with Rakshit Shetty as his increasingly desperate son, but there is plenty of joy in the film too and the emotional highs and lows are cleverly balanced. This is one of the best films I’ve seen this year so far, and as icing on the cake, it even has grammatically correct English subtitles!

What makes Godhi Banna Sadharana Mykattu such a good film is that Hemanth Rao tells a simple story exceptionally well. It’s just a bonus that the characterisations are superbly done and the dialogue is moving and funny while still sounding realistic and plausible. Venkob Rao (Anant Nag) is a widower who has developed Alzheimer’s and although he can remember his long ago past, his short-term memory is gone. Venkob’s son Shiva (Rakshit Shetty) has moved to Mumbai to work and placed his father in a nursing home since Venkob can no longer live by himself. The pressures of work and the distance that separates them mean Shiva rarely sees his father but when he comes back to Bangalore to seal a business deal he takes Venkob shopping for new clothes. The frustrations of dealing with an elderly and confused man while trying to buy him clothes and simultaneously talk business on the phone is eloquently portrayed here in just a few short scenes and Siva’s impatience is just as authentically portrayed. It’s nicely done and while Shiva comes across as an angry and harried man, Anant Nag gives Venkob dignity and occasionally lets a hint of mischievousness peek through that gives an insight into his personality before the Alzheimer’s disease took over.

After reaching breaking point, Shiva bad-temperedly drops Venkob off outside the nursing home and speeds away for a business dinner, but in the time it takes for the security guard to reach the front gate Venkob vanishes. Shiva immediately takes his frustrations out on his father’s doctor at the home, Dr Sahana (Sruthi Hariharan) threatening to ruin her career and sue the home although he was the one who didn’t take proper care of his father.  Dr Sahana is no pushover and hits back with Shiva’s abandonment of Venkob and his lack of engagement despite her calls and emails about his father’s progress. The dialogue is perfect, the reactions genuine and both Rakshit Shetty and Sruthi Hariharan are completely believable in their roles as they start the search for Shiva’s missing father.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPR6UoMXUfc

Elsewhere a government official has been murdered and Ranga (Vasishta N. Simha) and his assistant Manja (Ravikiran Rajendran) have been given the job of disposing of the body. However their path crosses with Venkob when a brief stop along the way allows him to slip into the back of their truck. Unfortunately the truck crashes and when a good Samaritan Kumar (Achyuth Kumar) stops to help, Ranga and Manja steal his car and haul both Kumar and Venkob along as hostages. With Kumar and his family locked up in their house with Venkob and the two villains, tension starts to rise as Ranga’s boss tells him to kill everyone and move on. Meanwhile Shiva is still searching for his father with the help of Dr Sahana and through her eyes Shiva starts to see his father in a new light. The physical search becomes a way to reconnect with his past and possibly his father too if he can ever manage to find him.

Anand Nag is absolutely brilliant as a 66 year old man with Alzheimer’s, but the rest of the cast are just as good. Vasishta Simha is superb as a career criminal who is fine with disposing of bodies but struggles with the idea of cold-blooded murder. Since his potential victims include Kumar’s wife and young son as well as the effectively harmless Venkob, his reluctance is perhaps rather understandable. Ranga is not a killer and his emotional turmoil is perfectly shown, particularly when Venkob starts to confuse Ranga with his son Shiva and tries to give him advice. His memory may be gone, but Venkob can recognise a soul in distress and his attempts to console the man who is trying to kill him are heart wrenching. Despite this, Hemanth Rao keeps everything from getting too emotionally bogged down by including small moments of perfectly nuanced humour that fit surprisingly well into the story. It would be easy to use Venkob’s condition to generate some cheap laughs, but instead we are laughing with Venkob rather than at him, and it makes all the difference to the mood of the film. As well as the sudden lapses back into confusion by Venkob, the excellent performance by Achyuth Kumar makes this part of the film memorable for all the right reasons and the mix of tension, drama and humour created is spell-binding.

Although some of the scenarios are rather far-fetched (it’s hard to believe for example that Sahana has time to go jauntering off searching for a patient and abandoning her case load at the home), nothing about the film feels too contrived and the story moves smoothly between the search for Venkob and  the cooped up criminals. Rakshit Shetty puts in another commendable performance after Simple Agi Ondh Love Story, with an accurate portrayal of a man searching for his father and finding himself along the way. Sruthi Hariharan is just as good here as she was in Lucia and I thoroughly enjoyed her performance here as the down to earth and practical Dr Sahana.

The music was a little too loud at times in the cinema, but the songs from Charan Raj are all lovely and at the right volume suit the mood of the film perfectly. The cinematography too by Nanda Kishore is good with some great visualisations of the mental distance between Venkob and Shiva. This is one of those rare gems where everything just comes together, with story, cast, characterisations and all the technical aspects flawless and perfectly executed. It works because Godhi Banna Sadharana Mykattu is quirky and different but at heart is a tale that will resonate with audiences. The story jumps between father and son and between present and past. There is the contrast between one man’s search for his father and a relationship that appears to be lost, and another’s search for his conscience and a way out of a bad situation. This is film-making at its best and I can’t wait to see what Hemanth Rao comes up with next. Highly recommended – you don’t want to miss this one!

Simple Agi Ondh Love Story

Posted on by

Simple Agi Ondh Love Story

The story of Simple Agi Ondh Love Story is one familiar from a number of Hollywood romances, but it gets a new treatment here from director Suni. He’s stuck to a minimal cast and limited shooting locations but included riddle-like dialogues and snappy comebacks to add interest to the screenplay. The film describes a romance between Kushal (Rakshit Shetty) and Kushi (Shwetha Srivatsav) with the narrative taking place one wet monsoon day when the two first meet. It’s a slow-paced film which does drag somewhat in the middle, but is redeemed by a good beginning and an excellent ending. Not a film for everyone perhaps, but worth a look as an example of new, independent cinema in Karnataka that seems to be just a little bit quirky.

The film starts with an RJ Rachna (Rachana) telling her audience a story about her brother Kushal. He is off to Kodagu area in Coorg to meet Rachna’s fiancé’s sister Ithihasini. The hope is that a romance might blossom between the two since Rachna feels she cannot go ahead and get married while her brother is still unattached. I cannot imagine that her listeners would have been in any way interested in the story, particularly since she annoyingly starts each sentence with ‘Actually…’, but as a method of introducing the actors it works well. Kushal directs advertising films and is also a keen photographer, so his interest is drawn when he sees a girl out in the monsoon rain taking photographs. Naturally when he turns up at the house to meet Ithihasini, she turns out to be the girl he has seen in the rain, and just to keep the clichés going he immediately decides then and there that he has found the girl for him. However unusually then the two are left to their own devices for most of the rest of the film. Rachna has called Ithihasini to let her know that Kushal will be there, but the rest of the family have gone to visit a temple for the weekend, leaving Ithihasini to entertain Kushal by herself.

There is a lot of fast banter between the two as Ithihasini quizzes Kushal about his reasons for wanting to meet her and Kushal tries to get past Ithihasini’s evasions when asked about herself. The dialogues often seem in the form of brain-teasers, or maybe they appear as strange questions due to the subtitling, but Suni seems to mix old-fashioned similes and sayings with modern speech giving a rather more unusual dialogue. It sometimes makes the interactions between the two difficult to understand and I found I had to pause the film to re-read some of the subtitles to get a clearer sense of what the characters were trying to say.

As a way to get to know each other, the two share their previous love stories, which are shown in the form of flashback episodes. However the same actors play the roles of each other’s previous partners in these flashbacks which backfires to some extent as the film becomes monotone and flat as a result. There is little differentiation between the characters as they are themselves and their appearance as the ‘ex’. Although there is some attempt to make them at least appear different – Jarin for example has long hair (complete with manband) and a beard compared to Kushal’s short hair and shaven chin, the personalities appear identical and the dialogue retains the riddle pattern, adding to the similarity. The love stories themselves are also rather dull, although the dialogue is often quite funny and the few songs do help lift the mood. However, by the end of the flashback sequences Kushal seems a bit of a wimp and Ithihasini appears even more immature and irritating than before.

Ithihasini’s actions seem a little odd and her responses to Kushal’s questions all avoid direct answers so it’s not really a surprise when Kushal’s sister calls to tell him that the girl he has been spending time with is not Ithihasini at all. When confronted the fake Ithihasini comes up with a number of different stories, but Kushal finds her even more intriguing as a result and declares his love for her despite not knowing who she actually is, although he does finally discover her real name is Kushi.

The final part of the film is better, adding suspense with the mystery around Kushi and the reasons for her confusing actions. The end has a surprising twist and makes up for the dreary middle section, particularly as both actors finally begin to react more to each other in a more natural way. There is genuine emotion and the overly complicated dialogue is replaced by more spontaneous sounding exchange. The different approach gives the ending more impact and made me wish there had been more of this honesty and emotion earlier in the film.

For new actors, Rakshit Shetty and Shwetha Srivatsav do a good job with their roles, particularly given that the action focuses solely on just them for most of the film. Shwetha’s Kushi is particularly irritating at times, which I think is the whole point, and does provide a good contrast to Rakshit’s more sensible Kushal. Shwetha does however come into her own into the last scene and also has some great facial expressions throughout the film. Rakshit has a little more to work with earlier in the film and is also excellent in those moments where he has to show more emotion. Although most of the film is shot in the same house with the ever-present monsoon, cinematographer Manohar Joshi captures the different moods of the rain and the subtle changes in lighting well. There is also a good contrast in the romance between Kushi and Jarin which is set on the beach in the summer and is a pleasant change from all the rain.

What I like about Simple Agi Ondh Love Story is that’s an attempt at something a bit different. The decision to use minimal locations and only a few actors may possibly have been driven by budget considerations, but it does keep the story simple and focus attention on the dialogue. A little more editing in the flashback sequences would have helped but overall I enjoyed the romance and liked the characters. Simple Agi Ondh Love Story is an unusual style of film that is definitely worth a watch provided you are a fan of the romance genre and don’t mind a minimalist approach. 3 stars.