Director: B.S. Pradeep Varma
Cast: Sruthi Hariharan, Shraddha Srinath, Shwetha Pandit, Achyuth Kumar
B.S. Pradeep Varma’s Urvi unleases ample rage on screen and at least as far as the theme is concerned — child trafficking, forced prostitution and rape — the anger seems justified and eternally relevant. Also, very rarely in Kannada cinema has a film championed three strong female protagonists, dedicated complete screen length to them and looked with them instead of at them.
However, the problem is that Urvi still does not emerge as a strong film. This is primarily because of the way Varma constructs his narrative.
The film revolves around the stories of Daisy (Shwetha Pandit), Suzie (Shraddha Srinath) and Asha (Sruthi Hariharan). Each of them ends up getting trapped by Devarugunda (Achyuth Kumar), a wretched, powerful man who kidnaps women, rapes them and forces them into prostitution. What the three women do together to get out of this vile predicament forms the rest of the story.
A tried and tested premise yes, but what mattered is Varma's treatment. And it is here that the film disappoints.
The narrative universe of Urvi is unbelievably small. One brothel, one police station and one bad guy — even for one city, this is a bit too small and Urvi straddles two landscapes. So, characters in the film meet each other far too easily and often their 'coincidental' encounters seem contrived. One could take a leap of faith here and there, but not as consistently as the film demands.
Then there is the overall oversimplified nature of the film, be it in terms of character sketches or its world view of prostitution.
Varma's characters, especially the negative ones, are utterly simplistic and extreme versions of bad. Devarugunda is an example.
Bobby (Bhavani Prakash), the brothel owner and pimp too is an extreme, caricatured version of a villain. Even in terms of performance, Prakash's portrayal of Bobby with the cliched villain laugh and delivery of lines is ineffective. Achyuth Kumar performs well, but one wishes that his character had been given some more depth and background.
The three lead actors manage to hold the attention of the audience despite all of this, but in the extremely polarised universe of the film, their performances too are barely sober. Also, as performers, one felt that their potential was largely underutilised. If only, there was a stronger, more nuanced story to back the actors.
But it is also equally true that Urvi is a film that has its heart in the right place: the outrage is justified, the message is clear, it has a climax that is hard hitting and it gives sufficient space to its female characters. But Varma struggles to weave a cinematically cohesive narrative around its strong message. And what good is the message if the story that it emerges from is a bit too simplistic and cliched?
The cinematography is indeed poetic — the frames are beautiful both indoors and outdoors. Almost everything in the film, from the costumes to the fights is stylised and art-fully crafted, sometimes bordering on saturation. But one would not have had a problem with the extreme attention to style (if the heroes can boast of swag, why not the women?) if it was couched in good writing.
