PANCHARANGI - Kannada movie review

• DIRECTOR Yograj Bhat
• ACTORS Diganth, Nidhi Subbaiah, Ramya Barna, Anant Nag, Raju Talikote
• RUN TIME 125 mins

A let down by Yograj Bhat. Pancharangi loses track from the word go. Heavy on dialogues (funny at times but evoking only a wry smile mostly), the film is the director’s philosophy on love, marriage and life distilled from his previous films. The story, scenes and plot are very diluted and could have easily fit into an hourlong tele-drama.

Falling in love during a big fat wedding is passe. Even Mungaru Male had that theme. So Yograj Bhat dilutes the backdrop to a meet with a prospective bride. Since it is not a wedding, the ancient and imposing house is not decorated; there are only a limited number of characters and the few locations seem overused. These make the film look stingy despite the excellent visualisation.

Bharat Kumar (Diganth) cares about nothing but abusing the ‘normal and boring’ life of other people and falls asleep anytime, anywhere. He funds his post- graduate course on Kannada by dressing up mannequins with sarees. His ‘normal’ brother has grown up to be a NRI techie on the insistence of their parents. The family goes to see a bride-to-be for the brother. Bharat and the girl’s cousin (Nidhi as Ambika) fall in love. Since there is not much of a story to comment on, it is nice to note that the dialogues are not predictable.

A character’s failure to reveal its true identity due to strict parenting, a fraud in the guise of a holy man, a blind man’s world view, a deserter’s quest for lost family are some of the better ideas in the film which still doesn’t manage to stamp an impression.

Since the love story has to happen in just a day and half, everything about the characters has to be revealed by way of dialogues alone. Diganth’s character who ends every sentence with the rhyming ‘galu’ begins to bore after a point. Perhaps the director knew the drawback of relying heavily on dialogues so the characters speak three different dialects of Kannada. The songs are good. But better heard than seen. Mostly good looking characters, but that is not everything about a film.