Vamshoddaraka (Kannada)
Director: Aditya Chikkanna
Cast: Vijay Raghavendra, Meghana Raj, Lakshmi, Rangayana Raghu, Sadhu Kokila, Vinaya Prasad
Vishwa (Vijay Raghavendra), the protagonist of Aditya Chikkanna’s Vamshoddaraka , says and does all the right things, always. He returns to his village leaving behind the chaos of the city. He kisses mother earth as soon as he reaches his village, sings praise of the farmer and feeds the starving cows first even before meeting his mother. He tours his village, learns about the ills of the community and finds a solution to most of them. He has one problem though. He is simply too charitable.
Right from its opening frame, Vamshoddaraka oozes oodles of sentiment and melodrama. On seeing that Vishwa’s charity is causing more trouble than good, his mother Annapurna (Lakshmi) makes him promise that he will not indulge in philanthropy any further. Now, the rest of the plot is about whether he can live up to the promise and not succumb to his tendency to be too generous, like give off a kidney or something.
Though more like a brochure of Vishwa’s philanthropy, this story, on paper, is nice. You feel like applauding when Vishwa stops some villagers from gullibly selling off their land to an industrialist. He makes some compelling arguments about how there needs to be a balance between industrialisation and farming, and so on and so forth.
However, you have to search for this coherent version of the script on screen. There are some real problems with editing in this film. Not only is footage that is shot on varied formats put together rather haphazardly, even the narration of the script lacks clarity thanks to the shoddy editing.
Up against the severely good guy is, of course, an acutely bad guy (Rangayana Raghu), who lusts after married women, tries to rape them and even burns one of them alive.
Strangely, it is not Vishwa that teaches him a lesson but another villager.
Especially, in the second half of the film, there are a couple of sub-plots that have no connection with the main story and so, the director quickly settles all of them in haste and focuses on the do-gooder Vishwa.
There is a romantic story weaved into all of this. It is love at first sight for Ratna (Meghana Raj) and Vishwa. They hardly speak to each other and Ratna, for the most part of the film, stands silently and admires Vishwa’s charity.
Overall, the filmmaker seems to struggle with subtlety and this is not just because his entire film is obsessed with exaggerating one trait of one man.
In another scene, for instance, when a rapist is lecherously looking at a woman, the camera zooms in on her breasts. When there is a kidney transplant (spoiler alert), we are shown the entire operation — the blood, the removal of kidney and its placement from one body into another. These bits could have been edited out entirely for they don’t serve any purpose except to disgust the audience.
Vamshoddaraka gives you a little too much of everything ( pun intended ) and that is not necessarily a good thing.
