When cupid turns cross-dressed!

One of the enduring kinds of cinema in India is the one in which the hero dresses like a woman. Sivakarthikeyan, a popular name in Tamil cinema with a string of hits to his credit this year resorts to this technique of titillating and entertaining the Telugu audience with ‘Remo,’ his debut film. It had hit the cinema theatres in Tamil a month and more ago, to a noticeable box-office response all over.

With Keerthy Suresh as his leading lady, SK, as he is known in the film, sets about enacting the director’s storytelling which is a combo of comedy, sentiment and a little melodrama here and there with kids brought in when required. This pair had hit the bull’s eye with their earlier film in Tamil and Keerthy is now rapidly shooting up the popularity graph all over Southern cinema. So, this is the gamble on which the film’s prospects rest.

About two decades after Kamal Hassan’s ‘Bhamane Satya Bhamane,’ where his ‘dual’ role of a care-taking granny and a harried husband received good response, yet another film in which the hero dons a similar male/female role and spends considerable screen time in both the gender modes has been released.

From the entertainment point of view, the formula seems to work to an extent despite showing the heroine in a scatter-brained mode, unbelievable as it seems, given that she is a qualified doctor! With a single-point agenda of realising his dream of bagging the girl he covets, Sivakarthikeyan, otherwise a wannabe film hero just bulldozes his way into the workplace where his beloved is an important person in her own right.

To his credit, SK has done a good job, balancing the awkwardness which is usually prevalent when such wanton transformations are shown on screen with a tinge of comedy which clicks. What is noticeable is this trend of modern cinema big boys to break into a semi-finished marital arrangement of their dream girl and turn it favourably into their side, by working on the heroine’s mind and diverting it towards them. Fodder enough for critics of mainstream cinema which does not lend much intellect to the heroine’s role, even otherwise!

With popular names like P C Sreeram for cinematography and Anirudh for music, the film insures itself against stutters on these fronts and moves smoothly, despite its predictable climax. For Telugu film patrons, it would be assessing the appeal of one more hero from Tamil cinema, who have been continuously exposed to them since the duo of Kamal and Rajini who had a parallel career of sorts here for nearly four decades!

Film Name : Remo

Cast : Siva Karthikeyan and Keerthy Suresh
Direction : B Kannan
Genre : Comedy
Likes : Easy, breezy pace of the film
Dislikes : Formula-ridden, predictable ending