Malli Raava - Movie Review

Analysis

Karthik and Anjali are class mates in Rajolu. They like each other. Anjali’s parents who came to Rajoulu on a job transfer from Mumbai are going through marital issues. Their constant quarrels affect her, she turns lonely and in turn this 14-year-old girl loves Karthik. Expectedly, her parents scold her when they learn about this. Anjali’s parents again move to Mumbai. This happens in 1999. The film’s story begins in 2012 in Hyderabad with Karthik waiting at Registrar’s office for Anjali. She comes but tells him on face that she can’t marry him. Then the story moves back and forth. How their childhood friendship began in 1999 and revealing how Anjali entered in his life in 2012. This goes on for hours and finally it comes to the present -2017. Anjali is about to marry an NRI in couple of days but she comes back to meet Karthik to tell him something. What is that?

The film's story goes on paper like this but writer-director Gautham Tinnanuri has used back-and-forth technique to maintain the suspense and mood as he has flimsy line on hand. The core point of the plot does appear in the final fifteen minutes. Before this, he focuses on childhood romance, office romance (2012) and silly office jokes (the employees in the office act more like government office than in a software company). Although the movie has runtime of roughly two hours, we feel that it is too long as it never engages us. Unless one likes outdated scenes of teenage romance and lame office jokes, the entire first hour bores.

Why is that a heroine only realizes her true feelings for hero only when she is about to marry another person? We have been seeing this thread from early 2000s and still the makers are not thinking beyond this beaten-to-death formulae.

New director Gautham has written story, screenplay and dialogue apart from direction. But there is nothing new in this flimsy story. Some music bits are good though.

As far as performances are concerned, Sumanth is his usual shelf, nothing much to talk about. Newcomer Akanksha Singh impresses. The two kids who played the junior versions of lead pair are impressive.

Cinematography is neat, the cameraman seems to have fascination for aerial shots of roads, which he has captured well. Shravan Bharadwaj’s background score is good. Production values are good.

Bottom-line: ‘Malli Raava’ tries hard to be something different in the love stories but it stumbles at the very beginning. Too much focus on kids' romance, with flimsy conflict point, it hardly holds any interest. Heroine and music are saving grace though.