The real magic of this charming, artless excursion into wonderland set not in some never-never land but the crowded sweaty streets of Hyderabad, is not Fahadh Faasil speaking such fluent Telugu.
The real magic of Don’t Trouble The Trouble is that it delves into the theme of magic tricks, but emerges with the concluding passage of poignant awareness that the real magic of life is to find love and healing even when the world all around us is on the skids.
Phew! I know. That is one helluva long breathless monologue on a film that you probably read not-so-positive reviews about the other morning. The thing about initial reactions to a film that does not pander to the culture of pedestrianism ,is, we tend to dismiss it as over ambitious and muddled.
Don’t Trouble The Trouble (a title that I find annoying and troublesome) is neither too ambitious for its good nor muddled. It faithfully and prettily creates a world of innocence and charm without getting over-cute.
An excellent Fawad Faasil plays a small time hustler Suri who is saddled with the responsibility of looking after a little girl who is… well, not quite there. Is Divya (Ssara Palekar) for real? Or is she just a figment of Suri’s imagination? Is Divya a magical manifestation of all the churnings that we smother in our subconscious?
There are plenty of questions in capital letters swimming in the visual velocity of this film that refuses to slow down even when the going gets tough, and not just for Suri, his little companion and the dog Snoopy.
That’s a cute happily-ever-after family portrait which screenwriters Shashank Yeleti and Hamza Ali screw into a plot that refuses to abide by the rules of “cute” filmmaking. Come to think of it, the little girl is not so cute as she is sensible. All her supernatural hi-jinks embody a Manoj Night Shyamalan kind of reality craving to break away from its genre-defined shackles.
Unlike the trope-triumphant little-girl-big-daddy films that have come to Telugu/Tamil cinema lately, Don’t Trouble The Trouble, doesn’t play it safe. The protagonist remains a charlatan almost till the end, when he is rescued into redemption by a climax which is wounding and healing at the same time.
Shashank Yeleti’s direction favours a frenetic narration without any shortcuts. The city of Hyderabad breathes life into the Disney-meets-Shyamalan proceedings without losing sight of its goal: to be a film about ghosts and dosts and mirrors that sometimes lie to get to the truth.
The mood is staunchly levitational and yet rooted to the ground. Some of the chase sequences go on for too long. But eventually, you just can’t enough of this magical romp.
