I watched Telugu movie Prastanam and felt I should go out on to the road and shout, then thought, rather its a more sane to write it here. This is not a movie review.
First of all I can’t imagine that someone can make a movie like that, most of the time when I was watching this movie, I had my mouth open, whenever a song starts I used to realize that my mouth is open and my eyes were double the normal size. Except 2 songs rest all dream songs were boring as usual.
First credit goes to Direction and Screenplay, I don’t remember seeing a movie so gripping and engaging (you are free to think that I haven’t watched lot of movies). Except songs, there was not a single scene where I was able to wink my eyes. And surprisingly as I generally try to predict in other movies, I was not even thinking of predicting, even if I tried to I would have failed.
I thought may be for every scene, it would have taken months to write dialogues, because, for an ordinary dialogue writer it’s impossible to write these any earlier, or may be, in other movies they don’t use the actual dialogues written by dialogue writers. I loved every dialog by Sai Kumar and Sarwanad. Before intermission an old person sitting before fire, tells Sarwanand about Leader “Right from birth, Man burns like fire till he dies. Burns with hunger, burns with Anger, burns with Lust and Jealously. With that inner fire few burn everything they touch and grow, few others use the fire as a lamp, show light to others and grow” . After hearing this I said to myself, man! how the hell can someone write something like that? This dialogue is not delivered with high pitch or no regular Sai Kumar stuff, but still it’s really intense. If I start writing my favorite dialogues I have to write all the dialogues from the movie. But I can’t resist from writing one more of Sai Kumar's “Selfishness is the real character of humans, Selflessness is just a shield guarding it”
About the story, I just see it as a political thriller, I was more impressed about how they told the story rather than what they told. But still the way current political ground realities are shown and amount of study that went in to it is impressive. Especially about people who are loyal to Leaders and parties and how their lives get ruined for selfish leaders. When Basha enters into masjid being chased by police who tries trying to kill him, his agony of being targeted by someone who he believed for 40 years and the way it’s shown, ho man.
Who says Indian cinema lacks technical values? Prastanam should at least get one national award, provided some Hero’s mom doesn’t become Panel’s chairman. It’s sad that this movie was not a big hit and didn’t stay in multiplexes longer (may need a re-release with better publicity), but I’m sure it would have made every film maker to rethink about the way they were making movies and that can lay path for better movies.
May 27: Watched Prasthanam again yesterday, at http://www.rajshritelugu.com/Video/Prasthanam online on demand version without 4 songs (better). Again equally awesome.
