Early in Premante in Tamil, there is an interesting sequence where the “boy” Madhi (Priyadarshi Pulikonda) and the girl Ramya (Anandhi) while attending a wedding(how many Tamil-Telugu films have we seen which begin at a wedding?) sneak into a room to retrieve her saree that Anandhi’s parents gave away to the bride without Ramya’s consent.
It is a very interesting little sequence. Savour it. As most of what follows thereafter is more half-baked than laugh baked. Writer-director Navaneeth Sriram is on tough trough most of the time, mistaking absurdity for humour,exchanging logic for ludicrousness and bantering giggles for imbecility.
Perhaps I am being a little harsh on what is at the end of the day just an innocuous day in the life of a overreaching storyteller who can’t tell the difference between cheer and jeer. The film feels more like an extended stand-up comedy about a marriage scraping the bottom of the relationship cauldron than a movie about a husband who has a deadly secret to share(or to not share ) with his wife.
Priyadarshi Pulikonda tries hard to be funny, which is hard to be when the purported jokes are as funny as watching two porcupines mating.
Compounding the aridity of comic ideas is a subplot about a female cop Asha Mary (Suma Kanakala) looking out for a juicy case during a night petrol. She gets more than what she bargains for when Ramya and Madhi are caught with their plans down.
Incidentally, the lady cop’s bantering with her senior is seriously offensive. They behave like two school kids rather than law enforcers.
I came away from Premante with not one genuinely funny gag. It all sems like a hodgepodge of internet jokes and personal sniggers taken out of context from a parents’ meet on how to keep children away from online toxicity.
The performances are embarrassingly cramped. Everyone is told to make faces, roll their eyes and say dialogues that are poor versions of the sharp retorts in Friends and other visual comforters where the characters seem funny because they are not trying to be. In Premante it’s the opposite. Everyone is trying too hard to be funny. Nobody knows what the joke is, maybe because there is none.
