Tej I Love You
Director: A Karunakaran
Cast: Sai Dharam Tej, Anupama Parameswaran
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
No matter how many movies prove it time and again, somehow some of our filmmakers never get the hint. Age old formulas, screenplays and narratives that might have incidentally worked before won’t work over and over again. Tej I Love You gives you a vague de- ja vu of every Karunakaran movie ever. Except this time it isn’t a pleasant one.
For those who care, there are spoilers ahead. Well, if painfully predictable twists count as spoilers, that is. The film opens with a ten-year-old Tej, who is an orphan except for a massive extended family who takes care of him, helping out a stranded woman and saving her life from goons. He murders one of them in the process and tells the woman to leave the spot. Although the woman wants to help out the kid, her conniving husband is hesitant to let her defend his crime. She writes a cheque to the boy and leaves to London where they later move and entrusts her husband to deliver it to him. Conniving as he is, he doesn’t.
Grown-up Tej (Sai Dharam Tej), who gets sent off to college right after his jail time, is thrown out of the house because he helps his sister elope. Of course, the audience do find out that he had taken the blame for her and was a sacrificial brother all along. Meanwhile, he crosses paths with Nandini (Anupama) and after an hour’s worth of mutual harassment, they fall in love with each other. Alas, before Nandini accepts Tej’s proposal, she meets with an accident. She forgets her past.
Well, conveniently three months and 12 days worth of it. What she forgets is that her mother, who of course, is the woman Tej helped years ago, sent her to India from London to find the boy, thank him and give him what he deserves as a dying wish. Her husband on the other hand cashes in on Nandini’s lost memory to influence her. Rest of the film is how Tej finds his way back into his house wins Nandini’s love, how Nandini finds out about her evil fathers’ ways, fulfils her mother’s dying wish and how she convinces Tej that she is not in love with him only out of gratitude. Yes, a lot happens.
First things first, the film is nauseatingly colourful. Editors could have gone easy on the colour correction. Vermillion shouldn’t be looking pink! As if the visuals alone were not enough, cartoonish portrayal of the characters only made it worse. Sai Dharam Tej in this role is a ball of misplaced energy. Anupama on the other hand was struggling to keep up. The film progresses erratically as romance, emotional and comedy sequences are thrown haphazardly together with a barely moving screenplay.
The story, dialogues and the tropes are all outdated. Be it the happy-go-lucky protagonist who is unrealistically selfless; a heroine who loses memory after an accident that barely gives her a scratch, the heroine’s father who is basically a money-loving villain or the hero’s friends who are solely meant for fat jokes and comic relief. The songs and background score try really hard to make an impact and fall flat. There is no element in this movie that you will walk out appreciating unconditionally.
It’s disappointing to see a filmmaker who rewrote the trend in 1998 with Tholi Prema, fall into the rut of his own making a decade later with Tej I Love You. It’s time to move on. Telugu audience did.
srividya.palaparthi@newindianexpress.com
@PSrividya53 (Twitter)