There’s a 15-20 minute block of Yaagavarayinum Naa Kaakka early in the second half that’s thoroughly riveting. I’m talking about the sort of filmmaking that leaves you on the edge of your seat, gasping for breath. The scene’s about a group of friends who make the disastrous mistake of picking up a quarrel with the wrong sort. It’s almost poetic, the way the petty squabble escalates into an ego-bruising, life-threatening altercation. This is the real beginning of Sathya Prabhas’ film, and it’s only from here on that you really are invested. The tragedy of Yaagavaryinum is that it truly begins in the second half, no matter what the red herrings in the first half make you believe.
Before you can get here though, you are taken through a formal round of introductions. There’s middle-class Saga (Aadhi), a B.Com final year student, and his three upper-class friends, Shiva, Rajesh, and Kishore. He’s such great friends with them that he has their initials ‘SRK’ tattooed on his wrist, which for some reason, his unbearably loud mother concludes to be the initials of a girl. Not Shah Rukh Khan, but a girl.
Yaagava , whatever its issues may be, isn’t a lazily shot film. Even when much isn’t happening in the first half, you can see that plenty of thought and effort has been put into each shot, into the visuals of the rather-unexciting songs, into the fight scenes that aren’t really necessary. It just doesn’t feel like the sort of film that needs thugs bouncing off the ground like they hit a trampoline. The whole thrill of the story is, after all, in believing how such a problem could potentially happen in our lives too; something that’s ruined when Saga randomly unleashes havoc on goons who scamper away with his girlfriend’s half-sari in a scene that’s rather reminiscent of Vikram’s first fight in Dhool .
But when the film does eventually begin in the second half, there’s quite a lot to like. It’s brave to have the hero’s friends start the trouble and show them as the bad guys. It’s brave to have Saga, the hero, mistrust his friends. It’s also pretty brave to have the hero seek resolution not through drubbing but through dialogue. I also liked it that there are senior actors in the film who aren’t really important in the bigger scheme of things. It keeps you guessing. Some subtlety could’ve been nice towards the end, as there’s too much emotion being milked with over-the-top performances and extra-poignant loud music. But that’s not really the film’s biggest problem. It is that it doesn’t start until you return from the interval break.
