In her short but incredible career, actress Sai Pallavi who celebrates her birthday today, has made spontaneity her trademark. Naga Chaitanya, who worked with the actor in the Telugu film Love Story, tells Subhash K Jha, “Sai is amazing. When she is on screen, you can’t take your eyes off her. She is a natural-born camera chameleon.” In Love Story, Sai plays Mouni, a spirited girl from the village with a dark secret, determined to make something of her life in the city. Mouni’s neighbour is a Zumba instructor, Revanth, played by Naga Chaitanya. Sai simply merges into her significant other’s dreams, and is an absolute natural.
In the Telugu costume drama Shyam Singha Roy, it’s hard to take your eyes off the flames of passion between Shyam Singha Roy and the lovely Devdasi Maithrayee. The romance unravels in Kolkata in the early 1970s. Maithrayee is rechristened Rosie. Sai Pallavi as Maithrayee/Rosie echoes the vulnerable yet strong personality of Waheeda Rehman in Guide.
Watching Sai dance, even Waheedaji would smile in approval.
Sai Pallavi’s best performance to date is in Gargi (2022), where she plays a working-class girl. Her father, Brahmanand (R S Shivaji), is a watchman, and Gargi works as a school teacher. She is engaged to marry a man who is considerate and amusing.
Gargi’s toil-filled but peaceful existence comes tumbling down when her father is held as one of the accused in the gangrape of a 9-year-old child. The stigmatization of Gargi’s family, the isolation and humiliation, the trial by media… are all sensitively adumbrated in the screenplay. Sai Pallavi makes Gargi’s struggle so tangible, it is as though we are sweating and sobbing it out with her. We want her to just… slow down.
There is so much to admire in Gautham Ramachandran’s Tamil film Gargi, that it becomes heartbreaking to watch it throw it all away in pursuit of a “shocking” unexpected senseless self-defeating twist at the end, almost like Manisha Koirala coming alive at the end of Sanjay Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical, except that there is no happy resolution in Gargi.
The relentless pacing is the film’s undoing. Suddenly, it all begins to feel a little over-burdened with plot manoeuvres as though the director cares deeply about his subject but is being dictated to by the demands of the box office.
The jobless, stuttering lawyer Indrans, who moonlights as a pharmacist, played with brilliant restraint by Kali Venkat, seems too much of a convenient contrivance, especially since his knowledge of prescription drugs comes in handy in court to bail out Gargi’s father.
In the courtroom, the presiding judge turns out to be transgender, which is very token-friendly and admirably ‘woke’ of the writer and director. But it seems like a bit of a stretch, especially when Her Honor gets a chance to declare, “I know both the arrogance of a man and the pain of being a woman. I am best qualified to judge this case.”
The shared agony of Gargi and her lawyer is the best moment in a screenplay that veers from agonized authenticity to manufactured drama. The denouement was so self-defeating that I wondered if there would be a twist beyond the twist at the end to rectify the suicidal finale. Giving in to extraneous pressures so close to the closure seems unbelievably compromised. Is this what Gargi’s story had to come to? Ironically, it is all about Gargi’s refusal to compromise.
The enormously compromised ending notwithstanding, Gargi has an abundance of conflicting emotions to offer. All the sleeping dogs in the bumpy ride are calmed by Sai Pallavi’s central performance. She is powerful without trying, compelling without crying. In her last film, Virata Parvan, she was able to make a strong impact despite a weak screenplay. In Gargi, there is nothing weak about the film or the heroine. It’s just the determination to keep audiences hooked till the end that does Gargi in. Nevertheless, an important film on the subject of child abuse and rape.
