The beginning months of 2023 were unprecedented to say the least. Despite SS Rajamouli’s magnum opus hitting theatres a year before, the first quarter of 2023 filled our news cycles with mentions of RRR, as its team took the film up West through the hallowed Academy Award campaign circuit. This effort did reap some benefits for the team, and the country as well, with the film’s music composer MM Keeravani picking up an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his smash single Naatu Naatu, along with his lyricist Chandrabose. The film’s win at cinema’s biggest platform worldwide also raised contentious debates on whether RRR should be considered as a Telugu film or an ‘Indian’ film. SS Rajamouli made no bones of the fact that his film is not from ‘Bollywood’, as folks in the West unaware of Telugu cinema are otherwuse quick to surmise. But what happened to the Telugu film industry after RRR? A lot. Enough for the average joe viewer as well as the overenthusiastic cinephile to remember that the industry still has a long way to go. Here are a few highlights of the ebb and flow of this year in Telugu cinema.
Telangana in focus
After decades of films largely focusing on the coastal Andhra milieu, with films and talent from Telangana largely existing on the periphery of mainstream culture, cinema with Telangana dialect slowly began to come to the fore post the state’s formation in 2014. 2023, though, was the year when the state’s cultural imprint found an enduring place in cinema, with local references going hyperlocal. While Srikanth Odela’s Dasara focused on the importance of the Dasara festivities in the Godavarikhani region, Venu Yeldandi’s Balagam shed light on the customs of bereavement specific to Telangana. The smaller films were not too far behind. Rupak Ronaldson’s Pareshan and Sumanth Prabhas’ Mem Famous married coming-of-age narratives with the sights and sounds of the Telangana village, while Tharun Bhascker’s Keedaa Cola and Abhay Bethiganti’s Ramanna Youth emphasised the unique subculture of political banners or ‘plexis’ in their quirky ways. The cherry on top of this cake is Bhagavanth Kesari, where one of Tollywood’s top stars, Nandamuri Balakrishna, was seen playing a man from Warangal.
Modern hues
Unlike Hindi cinema, where making films that specifically cater to the urban audience has been a common practice for years now, South Indian cinema, especially Telugu cinema shied away from that trend, considering how our forte is populist, hypermasculine, masala cinema. Despite that, 2023 did see ‘multiplex cinema’, ergo, films with urban themes and milieu, succeed at the box office. Hi Nanna, set in Mumbai, Goa and Coonoor and Miss Shetty Mr Polishetty, a film about a stand-up comic and a single woman trying to find a sperm donor are key examples of this trend finding its moment in Telugu cinema. Despite not finding many takers, smaller films like Men Too, a comedy focusing on the Men’s rights movement, and Mr Pregnant, where Syed Sohel Ryan played the role of a sincere-but-factually-dubious pregnant man, made their presence felt with their modern storytelling made primarily for the city-dwelling audience.
Some not-so-secret agents
Five years after the release of Adivi Sesh’s Goodachari, Telugu cinema had not one or two, but four releases set against a stylised, high-stakes intelligence backdrop. Starting with Akhil Akkineni’s Agent, which sank without a trace, we got Nikhil Siddhartha’s Spy, which frustrated the audience and critics in equal measure. Then came Praveen Sattaru’s Gandheevadhari Arjuna, starring Varun Tej.Though the film featured a mercenary and not a spy as a protagonist, the film’s globetrotting themes and intergovernmental hijinks warrant a mention in this particular category. This trend is capped off with Nandamuri Kalyanram’s Devil, where we see espionage meet conspiracy theory in pre-independence India. While this trend did not see any success in 2023, it has made its presence felt.
Remakes here and there
While remakes are neither novel nor trendy, 2023’s cinema witnessed its spate of adaptations that were middling at best and disastrous at worst. On the smaller budget end of things, Malayalam remakes made their presence felt, with the releases of Buttabomma (Kappela), Kota Bommali PS (Nayyattu), and Hunt (Mumbai Police). Pawan Kalyan and Chiranjeevi on the other hand came forward with Bro and Bhola Shankar, remakes of the Tamil films Vinodaya Sitham and Vedalam respectively. Both films failed big time at the box office. On account of being star vehicles, these remakes also raised scrutiny and debate on why films are being remade in 2023 when their original versions are easily available on OTT. Telugu OTT, itself, was not too far behind in steadily dropping Telugu Originals (Dead Pixels, Dayaa, Vadhuvu) that were, ironically enough, remakes of British, Bangladeshi, and Indian Bengali series in the first place. The waning trend of remakes, especially in large-scale projects, saw the audience demand filmmakers for fresh storytelling.
A crisis in comedies
Though 2023 witnessed the heartening successes of Samajavaragamana (a family comedy) and M.A.D. (a campus comedy), duds like Rangabali, Meter and Extra, along with comedy sequences in regular masala films failing to register an impact, reflected a decline in the quality of comedy writing. Considering how comedy is one of Telugu cinema’s biggest strengths, witnessing this pattern emerge is disheartening to say the least. One of the biggest culprits is the writers incorporating easy-to-find, low-hanging fruits like memes into their comedy sequences, thus shooting the film’s longevity and originality in the foot. A rehaul in this genre’s priorities is the need of the hour.
