When was the last time you saw a Telugu movie where the heroine’s character wears a sari or a half sari almost throughout the movie including in the songs? When was the last time you saw a Telugu movie which was neither a love story nor an action flick? When was the last time you saw a Tollywood hero play a character without flexing his muscles or bashing the goons? Welcome back to the world of K. Vishwanath. Do the scenes from his hit movies like Sagara Sangamam and Sankara Bharanam flash in your minds?
It would have been great if all the aspects mentioned above elevated the story and helped the director in carving a masterpiece. But alas! The final product is a movie that is too lengthy and not in sync with the times of the modern day. The story is also quite weak. In fact there doesn’t appear to be any story till the last 30 minutes by which time the audience is already in a mood to step out of the cinema hall.
Indu (Manjari Fadnis) is born and brought up in a Telugu family in Kerala. She loves music and falls in love with Chakri (Allari Naresh) who makes her and her family believe that he is a well to do person.
Indu gets married to Chakri only to realise that he is an ordinary guy who carries people visiting the holy shrine on his shoulders. However Indu not only pardons her husband but also supports him when her parents realise that he has duped them.
An old man (Sarat Babu) who is in the town to visit the holy shrine faints on the road. The kindhearted Indu takes him home, nurses him and brings him to back to normal condition. A few days later, Indu and Chakri find out that the old man is a rich industrialist when they visit his place. They also realise that Indu is a lookalike of his dead granddaughter Sindhu. A flashback of Sindhu’s episode followed by how the old man takes care of Indu and her family forms the rest of the story.
Manjari Fadnis delivers a terrific performance in what is probably her biggest role in a movie till date. Thanks to K. Vishwanath, she looks like a native Telugu girl and doesn’t ever seem like an import from Mumbai. Allari Naresh is impressive as her good for nothing husband. Sarat Babu does justice to his role as the old man who loves his granddaughter.
Music by Mani Sarma is above average but one gets the feeling that there are too many songs, with the lead pair breaking into a song to express the slightest emotion.
Most of the earlier movies of K. Vishwanath were big hits because they reflected the society of those days. In these days of Inception and Avatar, Subhapradam is clearly a misfit. It is a dream that not only fails to draw the audience to the cinema hall but also manages to put the audience watching it to sleep.
Critic: Raghu Chaitanya
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