Ante Sundaraniki
Telugu (Theatres)
Director: Vivek Athreya
Cast: Nani, Nazriya Nazim, Naresh, Rohini
Nani looks, smiles, and mutters as though he’s exclusively made for rom-coms. Even if his bread and butter solely depended on presenting himself as the ideal groom-to-be for the next few years, he’d make it work. He has a knack for cracking a joke and laughing along with his fellow cast members, which kind of makes his tomfoolery appear endearing.
In Ante Sundaraniki, there’s a scene where his character, Sundar, comes up with a weird analogy between haircuts and heartbreaks to tell Leela (Nazriya Nazim) that everything’s going to be okay. His story makes no sense at first, but then, when you give in to his absurd theory, it’ll fall into place like magic.
Ante Sundaraniki starts off with Sundar packing his bags to move to the United States. You get an abridged, albeit hilarious, version of his failure to achieve his dream of spending two months in a foreign land in his school-going days. It’s not a chance he misses because of a mistake he makes, though. Now, he’s all grown up and working in an office, doing a job that he doesn’t care about. And his boss, played by Harsha Vardhan, is a funny guy who doesn’t trust Sundar. Maybe, he’s seen too many people like him in his career – compulsive liars and slackers. Sundar is hence not the quintessential employee for an employer to have on his payroll.
The movie, from there on, slowly shifts from Sundar’s world (Brahminical) to the one created for Leela (Christian). And she’s not simply introduced as his love interest. She has a purpose of her own where she discovers her passion. Among the two of them, only she knows what to do in life. It’s not that Sundar doesn’t have any aims. He probably doesn’t get enough time to understand his strengths and needs because most of his days are spent on creating and selling elaborate lies to his conservative parents and grandmother. Leela’s family is also conservative. They’re all pretty strict, pretty religious, and superstitious.
Writer-director Vivek Athreya shows the differences and similarities between the two families well. The differences are seen in the festivals they celebrate, whereas the similarities are built along the lines of hatred. They don’t watch news channels at night and pass ugly comments on folks of other faiths, or send fake WhatsApp forwards to register their sentiments and apprehensions. However, they expect their kith and kin to follow the rules they have laid down.
Ante Sundaraniki doesn’t attack casteism and superstition directly. But it questions them in the right manner. Perhaps there’s a reason for this. Would the movie still have been a comedy then? No. It would have taken the road less travelled and ended up becoming something else altogether. Sekhar Kammula’s Love Story did that last year. And there are other movies in other languages that have addressed the same issue. Each film offers a different solution, but in this one, there’s compassion. The parents, who are the villains here, aren’t treated as bad examples. They’re given their own space despite their unevolved, sixteenth-century brains.
And beneath the moisturized layer of humour, Athreya talks about a woman’s role in a family. It’s a fully-developed subplot that runs for almost a quarter of the movie in which he breaks some stereotypes. He converts his message into a monologue in the end and makes his idea work like a charm. In the first hour, when Leela’s sister talks about how respect has come her way only after getting pregnant, it feels like a punch in the gut. It’s a sad world we’re living in and there’s just no mask big enough to cover it.
That stray bit from a conversation the two women have comes back later in a different form and that’s when the course of the rom-com changes. Honestly, Ante Sundaraniki doesn’t have a healthy dose of romance in it. Leela and Sundar come across as a familiar couple mainly due to the fact that they’re portrayed by well-known actors. (I want to see Nazriya in more Telugu movies, please. She’s also made for comedies.)
All the little gestures that we’ve come to associate with the genre are still there along with Vivek Sagar’s gleeful score, but the movie’s focus steadfastly remains on explaining that there’s always more place for empathy and harmony.