Well-defined female leads need of the hour

That Telugu film heroines are predominantly eye candies in the films they are featured is a fact as old as the hills. Poorly-written and hastily sketched roles are the only kinds that are reserved for them, another continuing tradition of the local cinema banners for decades now. Here and there, there are exceptions which slip through the cracks of commercial movie making.

Two new faces made their bow in Telugu filmdom this Friday – Ganta Ravi and Malvika Raaj- with their remake flick ‘Jayadev’, reprised from a Tamil hit. Typically the hero had the entire spotlight on him with his action and emotion, while the heroine, who does not have an identity of her own other than chasing the hero throughout the film, is shown walking into police stations in micro minis and sleeveless tops!

This is not only the film which has seen the histrionic abilities of heroines being utterly under-utilised. What is worth noting is that all this is being continued well into these modern times even by the younger lot of film directors, who specialise in making their big banner ventures with bigger male stars and superstars.

A case in point is the recent release ‘Duvvada Jagannadham’, DJ in short. Pooja Hegde, a stylish-looking femme fatale, who seems taller than the action-oriented hero Allu Arjun in the film, is featured as a fashion course student, about to leave for foreign shores to pursue a higher education. So far so good.

But her appearance and behaviour onscreen is not distinguishable from the other bombshell types who wear skimpy clothes and jive to EDM throughout the film. There is not a scene in which her specialised education is put into use, even when it would have only lengthened the already long running time of the film (around 160 minutes) by a few minutes more!

Similarly, in another film `Radha’, female lead Lavanya Tripathi, is an object to be pursued till she says yes to the romantic overtures of her beau. Then there was this crime thriller ‘Keshava’ which appealed to the public in which the heroine Ritu Verma is a law student but uses her skills on her hero more as a stumbling block to his revenge plans till the time she gets to know his mission. Such stereotyping has only added to the monotony of our kind of cinema for sure.