Baruvu thagginchu (reduce your weight), an elderly man tells Sundaram (Harsha Chemudu), who enters the remote village of Miriyalametta that has not seen an outsider in about 90 years. The casting of Harsha as Sundaram master is spot on for director Kalyan Krishna’s indie-style Telugu film, Sundaram Master, produced by actor Ravi Teja. Actors like Harsha are often subject to body shaming in narratives that are not sensitive or politically correct. This film turns the physical attributes of weight and skin colour on its head to narrate a heart-warming, fable-like story. Not everything about Sundaram Master hits the sweet spot. Some stretches call for some patient viewing but towards the end, the director ties up the different threads beautifully and hopes we leave with a smile and introspect about how we live.
It takes conviction to make a film like Sundaram Master, moving away from mainstream trappings. On paper, it must have looked like a story that a grandparent would narrate, with leaps of imagination, and ultimately arriving at a few lessons for life. Kalyan Santhosh dresses up such a story with some humour and a little else. Even a song (Sricharan Pakala’s background score and the song has a tinge of magic to it) comes only towards the fag end, as though giving into the mood of Sundaram and the villagers.
Sundaram Master (Telugu)
Imagine a village that is so cut off from the outside world that its people continue to live in a way we consider primitive — they live in tune with Nature, cook and eat what the forest and its surroundings provide them, work through the day and retire to their bamboo-walled homes at dusk. A voiceover informs us that the villagers realised they were self-sufficient, but the outside world eyed their natural riches and came to plunder them, so they severed connections so that no outsider would reach them.
Sundaram is a social studies teacher in a government school who is deputed to this remote village since the villagers requested for an English teacher. A calculative MLA (Harshavardhan) sees this as an opportunity to make political and financial gains and sends Sundaram with a plan. Sundaram is no saint either. Early on, we see him crudely discussing dowry at a pelli choopulu. Everything boils down to money for him. What happens when he sets off into Miriyalametta with his own assumptions of the gullible people forms the rest of the story.
Kalyan Santhosh pulls a few fun tricks out of his bag in the initial hour. The spelling error in the disclaimer at the beginning of the film, stating that the film bears (spelt as ‘bare’) no resemblance to real person, is a hint of things to come. It turns out that the spoken English of the villagers is impeccable since they learnt it during the colonial era but their spellings are all over the place. Plenty of laugh-aloud (or ‘laff’, as the villagers insist) follow. Come to think of it, the way they look at English spellings is through a lens of simplicity (what is a ‘c’ doing in black?).
All this humour is a cloak to what the film intends to convey. Once the jokes dry up and the narrative takes a serious idealistic tone, it calls for patient viewing. The film acquires a docu-drama-like tone when it tries to address issues related to the environment (cinematographer Deepak Yaragera’s visuals capture the beauty of the forests with a matter-of-fact approach rather than romanticise it), how we attach value to the rupee note and gold versus what the villagers hold in great value. The story also looks at life and death, and presents an idealistic notion of the final journey bereft of ritualistic norms. These are all well-intended segments but occasionally it gets preachy.
Just when you begin to wonder where the film is headed, it gets its act together towards the final stretch. In the pre-climax portion, we, the audience, are similar to Sundaram, watching the villagers get all emotional watching something on a makeshift screen. Sundaram is perplexed, then amused and finally gives into the emotional outpourings and realises that his transformative journey is complete. He realises what shedding weight actually stands for and there is also an explanation as to why the villagers prefer dark-skinned people and look at fair skin with distrust.
Making the transition from a comedy and supporting actor to the main lead, Harsha is effective as Sundaram, portraying the conniving nature and the transformation with sincerity. He keeps us invested in the film through some of its wobbly portions. Divya Sripada’s role could have been fleshed out better but the actor makes it worthwhile and gives it more depth. Chaitanya as Oja also makes an impression, along with several others cast as village folks, including Balakrishna Neelakantapuram as the village head.
Kalyan Santhosh also tips his hat to his favourite icons — from Mahatma Gandhi and Brahmanandam to cricketer Yuvraj Singh through different threads of the story.
Sundaram Master is not perfect but it is an earnest indie film that makes a plea to live a little more consciously.
