Readers Write In #732: The Natural Star Shines
By Aman Basha
The star whose shine rubs off on good Telugu cinema.
Making a top 100 list of Telugu Cinema can be a task that is both daunting and depressing. Very quickly, one realizes how well Telugu filmmakers thrived in the art of repetition. Breakthrough films became replicated formulas, actors were too constricted to their image and played safe, those who dared seemed destined to fail, the list seems too overstuffed with the works of a few greats, those who could have been greater seemed content with easy remakes.
There is also the question of age; as freshness and quality seem less to the test of modern morals. The humor at times is far too localized to translate and let’s not even get to the women or anyone who’s marginalized.
We haven’t even gotten to the glaring issue of nepotism, which works in insidious ways, gatekeeping freshness, keen to wallow in nostalgic references and often working purely on offscreen context and not onscreen content. The state of Telugu Cinema has never been truly great as its filmmakers’ potential, except few never actualized their talent in meaningful ways.
Of these few, one was Naveen Babu Ghanta. A child who loved cinema courtesy the star-actor Chiranjeevi, his understanding of cinema grew the more he encountered the likes of Mani Ratnam who was a regular presence thanks to that one Telugu classic and other successful dubbed films which grew increasingly popular in the 90s as RGV abandoned us for Bombay and Chiranjeevi the star only remained as against a Kamal Haasan who explored his talents to the fullest leaving Naveen in thrall.
Owing perhaps to the sheer lack of opportunities for outsiders as lead actors, Naveen began as assistant director, working under Bapu, a great director with a unqiue visual touch, atmospherics and female protagonists, but one who never made enough films to quantify his greatness, making remakes or overrated versions of the Ramayana. The start for Naveen though was auspicious.
Fate had other plans; a lead role of a big studio made comedy fell into Naveen’s lap. Made by a promising director who never topped his first two films, Ashta Chamma was ironically an indirect ode to the best of Telugu film nepotism, Mahesh Babu. Ashta Chamma, today though, is most remembered for giving us Nani.
Watching Ashta Chamma, who could think, that this young actor, reminiscent of NTR in Missamma days, would, in some ways, be a panacea of all the ills plauging the Telugu film.
Much of it has to do with Nani’s endurance, after Ravi Teja, he was the only outsider to make his mark and unlike Ravi Teja or even Rajendra Prasad, he consciously chose to break out of his comedy entertainer image and did so successfully, holding firm in the face of diminishing returns with choices like Jersey. None of these films are instant classic, but they are good and make a difference.
Nagarjuna’s famous grit to do different after Shiva didn’t last after a spate of flops. If it had, perhaps it would have been like Nani’s recent films, Shyam Singha Roy followed by Ante, Dasara followed by Hi Nanna, a rare family romcom blockbuster.
His high success rate is astounding when one realizes he has made only two remakes. It is even more astounding that all this was achieved with zero contribution from big-name directors, for all his directors are either debutants or barely a film old. The one time he did work with a star director, the result was Eega, Rajamouli’s best film (sorry Bahubali).
Eega also had the first strong Rajamouli heroine, which brings up another feature of Nani’s appeal: women. It isn’t just the female fans, but also the strong female roles and the relative lack of misogyny or sexism. This carries over even to a macho zone: both Shyam Singha Roy and Dasara had standout female leads.
Telugu cinema has a long way to go with dignified representation of the “other”, be it caste, region or religion, but Nani the producer took some baby steps with the first LGBT couple in his debut production or the dignity with the heroine’s family is portrayed in “Ante”.
All this is done when Nani is not even a top-tier Telugu star. Luckily, he has won over an overseas audience whose dollars have a high enough conversion rate to keep his ambition running with steam. One hopes with Saripodha Sanivaaram, the Tamil audience puts in some steam too.
With Chiranjeevi to admire, Kamal Haasan to inspire and Aamir Khan to aspire for, Nani has consistently stretched the boundaries of Telugu cinema one push at time. A moving visual at the pre release event of Saripodhaa Sanivaaram were the number of directors seated next to the Natural Star, each owing their debut to him, from the director of Hanuman to the makers of Dasara, Hi Nanna and Kalki, all of them holding some promise to Telugu Cinema.
At a time when failure can scare young stars into declaring they would never work with debutants, only Nani could have reunited with a director who made a flop with him, and ensured a big budget production for Vivek Athreya to make his acclaimed comeback with Saripodha Sanivaaram.
Nani once described his stardom as a wall that was built brick-by-brick, assembled by careful steps and not inheritance or lottery luck. One hopes this wall of his and the “Wall Poster Cinema” only grows bigger and stronger with time.
