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Reviews
Godhi Banna Sadharana Mykattu (2016)
A powerful concept watered down by poor script and direction
The concept: An ambitious son, with a strained relationship with his father, goes in search of his missing father and rediscovers his father and himself.
Potential: A cinematic masterpiece on human relationships.
What you will like: Excellent acting by Anant Nag. The soulful acting by Sruti Hariharan. Vasishta N. Simha's performance as menacing and brooding Rowdy Ranganna, which was several notches better than Rakshit's acting (I loved his baritone immensely - which added a lot to the character he played).
What went wrong:
1. Problems in the story and script:
The screenplay fails to weave-in powerful situations that cause the relationship between father and son to go sour and those which cause the relationship between the patient and doctor to grow strong.
The father is portrayed to be a great man but the scenes substantiating this are too weak. The scenes with H. G. Dattanna and school do not seem to serve this purpose.
Several other characters and a crime take away the script writer's energy and attention - which should have been used in weaving the story around one single central concept.
Scenes of son's discovery of his father and his own love for him are not fleshed out clearly.
Too much footage showing the son searching for his father has increased the length of this movie, exhausting the viewer and diluting the central concept.
Anant Nag's powerful performance is essentially limited to only one monologue - although the concept had tremendous opportunities to tap his potential fully.
2. Problems in the execution:
The cinematographer lost an excellent opportunity of aesthetically painting the beauty of Bangalore on screen. Instead we get to see some random shots of Bangalore and too many close-ups of people inside the car. Several panning and tracking shots suffer from jittery movement of camera.
Editing is jarring at several places.
Rakshit Shetty has a lot of scope for improvement - especially in the first half, where he appeared to be less involved in the character.
Some scenes could have been executed a lot better. For example in the scene where the son discovers a hidden painting on the wall of his home there is no gushing emotion (not melodrama). Rakshit appears cold and unmoved in comparison with the potential of that scene.
Although the music itself was above average, it was too loud in comparison with dialogues in several places. Not sure if it is a problem with the theatre's settings of 5.1 sound.
In spite of all the flaws the film deserves a watch - only to encourage such attempts in Kannada cinema that do not focus solely on entertaining people. But my heart aches to see a lost opportunity that would have brought more glory to Kannada cinema.