Monsoon Raga is a charming heartwarmer

Barring the very silly and compromised end-stroke, S Ravindranath’s Kannada film Monsoon Raga, now streaming on Zee5 is charming and heartwarming take on relationships, and how they influence our hearts into doing things that we may otherwise shy away from doing. There are four stories interwoven into a pleasing if not passionate pastiche of love and redemption . Some of these end in tragedy. But miraculously all of the stories merge into a mound of hope and empathy. Three of the four stories feature women with minds of their own. One of them is an unapologetic sex worker Asma who forms an unspoken bond with a liquor seller who gives her a quarter bottle every evening after a hard day’s work. So here is a heroine who sleeps with strangers for money and drinks every evening. Well played by Rachita Ram, though the liquor seller is played even better by Dhanajaya who steals every moment from his aggressive partner. The Hindu-Muslim angle in the story barely registers until the relationship falls prey to a communal tragedy. There is another truculent woman in the other story Ragasudha a Brahmin girl with a sharp tongue who ‘tames’a goon and marries him. This story in the omnibus is weaker than the others as it tries too hard to be a cross-communal love relation with plenty of tongue-in-cheek humour thrown in. Too culturally leaden. The strangest most exotic dish in the winsome menu is the story of a stammering idol maker and his angry little son. It’s a bitter-sweet take on the life that a parent tries to give his child at the cost of his own peace of mind. The symbolic tragic ending begs for some subtlety in an anthology that tells it like it is, with little room for tact or resplendence My favourite of the fetching foursome is the autumnal romance between a simple truthful endearing government clerk Raju (Acchyut Kumar) and his newly transferred senior Hasini, played by the wonderful Suhasini Haasan. Their bonding looks believable and unassuming. This story acquires a centrality by dint of its credibility. A large part of this story about two lonely people past the age of marriage trying to find a meeting-ground , evaporates at the end when some cheap gay swipes are taken at Raju’s bachelorhood. Haven’t we passed that era when all unmarried men were supposed to be gay? There are loads of snags and hurdles in the telling of the four stories in Monsoon Raga. But finally they all hold together in a loop giving us tantalizing peeps into the way people think when they are in love or when they THINK they are in love. I like this Kannada version of the omnibus better than its Telugu original C/o Kancharapalem. It is a tighter edited and better-looking film, specially the opening when we see Raju surrounded by imaginary Bharat Natyam dancers who accompany him everywhere. The imagination can be quite a naughty thing in the hands of the innocent.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and Instagram