Korameenu gets it funk from junk

Outwardly, Sripathy Karri’s Telugu film Korameenu is a routine cops-and-gangsters drama. But somehow Karri is able to give the standard tropes of the genre a funky twist. There are many points in the plot where the unexpected rears it glint-eyed head and we go, ‘We never saw this coming!’

Picture this. Karuna (Harish Uthaman) the dreaded gangster of Jalari Peta in Visakhapatnam tells his henchman Koti (Anand Ravi) to bring his girlfriend to him in the night. Scared of the repercussions if they don’t give in, the girl arrives to give the gangster what he wants. But there is a catch.

The devious unfolding of the above sequence is evidence of clever writing. Sadly, the plot quickens less often than it sickens. The writing(by Anand Ravi who also plays the lead) never gathers enough moment to leap over the tropes of the gangster genre. And I couldn’t really see how the cop-hero Meesala Raju (Shatru) fitted into the plot. Raju’s wrath over his criminally shaven moustache runs through the plot like a cross between a joke and an action trope. Neither funny enough to laugh at , nor serious enough for so much fisticuff fuss, the missing moustache had me wondering, ‘Why?’

Towards the end the plot quickens and thicken as the characters begin to display their true colours. I wish they didn’t. A bit more restraint and an aura of mystique would have gone a long way in imbuing an intrinsic intimacy and intrigue in the interweaving of the characters. Sadly, what we see is what we get: characters with petty ambitions fighting big fights in the hope of getting our attention by might instead of matter.

To quite an extent, Korameenu succeeds in getting our attention. The characters sometimes reveal themselves to be what they are not. This is very rare. But when it does happen , when fear is the key, the narrative opens doors to the unexpected. Those moments, rare as they are, lend a sense of exhilaration to the narration. Also, the coastal town is lovingly captured by cinematographer Kartheek Koppera without getting touristic.

Having said this one wonders what was the need for making the plot so unnecessarily tangled towards the end. The fitful leaps of narrative propulsion are what keeps it, and us, going. Some characters are better etched than others. Meenakshi played by Kishori Dhatrak is the most important female character in the film. She is at once annoying and compelling in her insistence doing things her way, but also willing to accept the consequences of her scrambled life decisions.

There is another prominent female character, a woman with a daughter who is looking for her missing husband. I am not sure why she is in the film. But she has a beautiful moment in the police station with the cop-hero Raju—yes,the couple who is obsessed with his (missing) mouche—when he tells her not to bring the child to the police station as it was not a decent place.

The woman turns around and smirks, “Let her come. The sooner she learns about such places, the better for her.”

Bravo! I am sure the line got its share of applause in the theatre. But I am not sure why she is in this film. Koorameenu is about many things all at once. It’s about a cop with a missing moustache, about drunken man haunted by his past, a woman with a missing husband, a couple Koti and Meenakshi in love trying to escape from her past…Regarding which, there is the best line of the film when he proposes to her after she is dumped by the villain , prompting her to say, “Oh, so you want to marry me now that I’ve been dumped so that every night you can ask me if you are better than him in bed?”

Koti’s reply is enough reason to see this film: “No I won’t ask you that. I am confident I will be better than him.” Touche.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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