Thursday, April 26, 2007

Mungaru male review (not by me)

Mungaaru Male (First Rain)



- Swarupananda Bissoyi

It takes 110 days in theatre for a kannada movie to be watched by a
non-kannadiga guy like me. Its not that all my kannada friends vouched
for the movie ( for the first time in four years of my staying in Bangalore),
its the soul-stirring songs that took me to watch Mungaaru Male.

Well, watching such a nice movie in a saturday evening with a Rs. 30/-
balcony ticket in a non-AC-but-DTS theatre was altogether a different
kind of experience. Of course a magical one.

Not everytime you watch a good movie! This movie, I would say a great
movie.

A gently crafted piece of work, with sheer brilliant execution by actors, director, cinematographer and above all the music director. Sonu Nigam should think himself lucky enough to sing such an ecstatic song. Mungaru Male was all about defying boundaries. Boundaries that exist within ourselves, boundaries that created kannadigas and non-kannadigas, boundaries that defines how to distinguish between good and bad films. It crossed all boundaries but it didn't dare to touch the boundaries created by the family that separates the protagonists of the movies Preetam and Nandini. A very usual love story - boy sees girl, love at first sight, a hooligan pursuing the heroine and our karate master hero doing everything for the
sake of love blah blah blah..

Expressionism at its best, the movie tries to depict the true character of our a Indian looking, tough but yet soft at heart young man. You don't need a deadening shahrukh to cry in a sheep-ish voice to limn pain ! Our local hard drinking guy delivers far better. You need not understand kannada to understand this kannada movie. A little rabbit Devdasa who symbolizes the immortal concept of love in the movie tells you the story. Not many times you find symbolism finding its way to filmdom.

For the two and half hours, the movie was extra ordinary and rhapsodic. But last two and half minutes of the movie will stir your soul, will make you somber. Suddenly you'll cry for you'll find yourself hard trying substituting in place of Preetam, when he was burying Devdasa wrapped with jasmine petals at one high point on earth where it all started. Love.

Land of sorrows, Ocean of tears, Valley of truth, End of life. Did our Preetam knew it before falling (he falls into a gutter at the first sight) ? Why on earth Nandinis do not understand Preetams ? (Or do female understand male beyond male understanding female ?) Everybody loves a love story, but why nobody loves lovers ? Why they couldn't meet at the end ? Is sacrifice - the highest form of love ? If yes, what love tries to achieve? If no, then what love will achieve ? Elton John puts it; and its no sacrifice/Just a simple word/Its two hearts living/In two separate
worlds/But its no sacrifice/No sacrifice/Its no sacrifice at all/Mutual misunderstanding/After the fact/Sensitivity builds a prison/In the final
act.

But why love never reach its end ? Why great lovers on earth have never meet? Famous oriya poet Ramakant Rath answers this phenomenon in his book Sreeradha - "once you achieve success, that becomes the end of your desire, after that nothing remains like love, you will feel empty within, coz the cause that drives you to this point no more exists and you will fail to imagine your success minus that cause". Hence, true love is all about the passion unadulterated by the desire of success. The moment you realize that, you opt for sacrifice. Mungaru Male tells at the end - Preeti Madhura, Tyaga Amara. ie Love is sweet, but sacrifice - immortal. But not everybody love to
sacrifice for love.

Heart strings playing on the wind....In the first rain of Madikeri

Haage summane ......

---Swarup

2 comments:

sarvagnaani said...

havent watched the movie..have heard a lot about it though..should have watched the last time i was in blr..
btw..i think mungaru is monsoon and not first..

sudeep said...

yes you are right...catch the songs on youtube...very beautiful !