Julayi Celebrating Violence

Julayi.
Most expectedly, Tollywood is out reaching its set of cliches. Julayi is a celebration of its grotesque heroics. Dollops of violence, stylised stunts, choreographic delights, stars you name them and the film has it all and in abundance. Perpetuating larger than life images could at one level be seen as commerce and at another as time tested entertainment formula but at no cost is it good cinema. Things go berserk and the script is a constant threat on your intelligence.

Pause for a moment and give this a thought. The whole concept is awry. Every few minutes the guy and gal break into a song in decibel levels that injure humanity and surely break the law. The corruption fighting citizen who is joking about Man, writing off Kiran and/or accusing KCR of a sell out is enjoying it. No protest, and instead is having fun. This is the huge divide between our performance and expectation levels that I reiterate in the context of a society whose major malady is corruption. Our pathological reliance on gory violence as a source of entertainment is a serious question mark on misunderstanding license for freedom. Sit through the script and if you enjoy anything other than the antics of Brahmanandam and MS Narayana then we need to redefine our claims of being human. The exaggeration of the narration is worse than those soaps we watch from our drawing rooms.

Julayi is another Friday celeb of violence, exaggeration and superfluous dramatics. This August Julayi is pompously painful and planned to cater to some mean part of our psyche. We permit an entire generation of school kids to perceive this as entertainment. Suspend sanity is the call. that is fair enough as a premise for entertainment. However it also demands we bid farewell to our sensitivity. There lies the danger. There lies the success or failure of the film, depending upon the angle of the kaleidoscope.

The purpose is not to play the role of a cultural police man but there seems to be a growing need to understand the impact of such stylised and repetitive over kill of violence as the response to life situations.
And then there is the star of the film: Allu Arjun. Caught in a systemic weakness for star value, he like every other victim of contagious narcissism is willingly adrift to the insanity of the script. His star value is not just intact, it is pumped up to keep his image inviolate. The larger than life model is now safer than sane to bet on. He surely achieves what they set out to get: To exploit the naive, to drug the collective. This is substantial, substance abuse.

And wait a while longer and you’d be informed that Prabhu Deva has acquired the remake rights with a fifty touching Khan or thereabouts Kumar to play the lead role with the latest Yash Chopra discovery to share screen space. There will also be discussion on whether the film is being readied for an Idd, Diwali or Independence Day release!

This mind paralysing exercise is another opportunity for us to scream for a saviour, who after being gleeful of the returns ask a la a poignant film maker: Jinhe Naaz hai hind par Woh Mahan hai? Our cinema has come to keep its tryst with violence with regularity and consistency. We seem to be victims of a cultural Tsunami of violence.

Annaji, please walk into a film theatre and see if you can impact a citizenry. It is culture that influences our politics and not vice versa.