Sekhar Kammula’s Kuberaa (Telugu) is a bit of a conundrum. It can’t be faulted for originality, and the interest level is kept alive right till the end, although at three hours the running time does feel like a bit of of a stretch, especially towards the end, when the chaos of covetousness catches up with the entrepreneur villain Neeraj Mitra, played by the interesting Jim Sarbh who really likes to let us know he is a good actor. Noted.
The two principal actors, Nagarjuna and Dhanush, are not pitched against one another. Sorry, this is not that kind of film. Those looking for a war of nerves between the two interestingly cast star-actors are in for a disappointment. In a departure from the norm in two-hero films, Dhanush and Nagarjuna play tangential parts, one a disempowered ideologue, the other a kind of misguided power broker who gets trapped in a situation that is not entirely of his liking, let alone making.
The two actors play their parts with minimized bravado, although the script and its treatment are not about underplaying. Nagarjuna and Dhanush are not the kind of actors known to let go. Dhanush has the more crowd-pleasing part as a beggar trapped into a posh scam.
Most of the lengthy film finds Dhanush’s character Deva on the run from the unscrupulous scamsters. Nagarjuna is one of them, until he does an about-turn. He has the more evolved part, going as he does from principled to compromised for self-preservation.
Co-writer-director Sekhar Kammula conveys a sense of cosmic largeness in the way he comments on capitalism and the underprivileged are pushed into the plot, even as a sense of enveloping ‘crowd-pleasingness’ designedly creeps into the narration.
What was the need to bring in the Rashmika Mandana character? Was it seen as imperative to have a proper heroine in the screenplay, since the only two other female characters (Nagarjuna’s wife and a pregnant beggar named Khusboo, who play a pivotal part in the climax) are pale and sketchy?
Mandana, as the runaway girlfriend of a man who ditches her at the railway station, is unmistakably a homage to Kareena Kapoor in Jab We Met. What follows is an uneasy, improbable, and hurriedly written relationship between Sameera and the beggar Deva, with Sameera sniping at poor Deva with her favourite f..koff line, “You die your death, I’ll die mine.”
Fine.
Kuberaa left me with a strange sense of dissatisfaction. It could have been a lot more than what it finally is. But what it is, is not dismissible or even missable. The film is impressively shot (by Niketh Bommireddy), who makes sure that the film is a big-screen experience. But the screenplay goes dangerously askew at times, leaving us with surplus characters (like the cop played by Siyaji Shinde, and Nassar as a vague Fagin at an orphanage) and perhaps more to bite on than chew.
