Yet another love story

 Sudheer Babu’s home production ‘Nannu Dochukunduvate’ jostles for space and public support as this week’s release. In a career of nearly a decade, the brother-in-law of Superstar Mahesh Babu has had a noticeable career with forays into Hindi films too in the recent past.  Blessed with an urbane, polished kind of a personality, Sudheer brings in a venture which is a combination of family sentiment and lovers who meet casually and realise their feelings for each other as the final reel surfaces.

Introducing his character as a no-nonsense professional in an IT company, Sudheer carries off the role with considerable ease. This dyed in the wool workaholic, in a bid to lend credence to his lie that he is seeing someone succumbs to his father (Nasser)’s diktat as he comes visiting to arrange for a beloved (Nabha Natesh) with whom he is to get married. His job is made easy as the girl, a college student is also shown to be a keen actress doing short films and ad spots and hence acts her part pretty convincingly.

Of course, things go haywire when the girl develops a soft spot and the man gets sucked in subsequently. Since it interferes with the hero’s ambition of making it big and landing a job in the USA, he decides to forego his love life and avoids the heroine. Before this is made known to the father, he develops health complications. From here on, the knotty scenario slowly unwinds itself to a predictable melodramatic ending. 

With no surprising twists or developments, the flat narrative, stuck in a hackneyed ambience of human virtues, love and care for family and how love triumphs at the end does not sustain interest. R S Naidu, the director, manages to take the film on to a 150-minute travel, yet the pace is sleep-inducing and hardly exciting.

The heroine from the neighbouring Kannada film industry is easy on the eye and plays her character efficiently. Nothing much to be added however on the music scene or songs composed by a new Kannada music director B Ajaneesh Lokanath. One is not sure, given the surfeit of family socials on television channels, such kinds of stories will still attract audience support, if there is a choice.