Jalsa

Sanjay looks like a young man in the city with no quarrel with anyone. He falls in love with Indu, but her father Rammohan Reddy will not have it and marries her to someone else. Time passes; now Bhagyamathi is interested in him, and Sanjay goes to speak to her father. The man in front of him is Rammohan Reddy again. Meanwhile the narrative goes back and opens Sanjay's past: he was once inside an armed movement. Trivikram Srinivas writes and directs. Pawan Kalyan plays Sanjay, with Ileana D'Cruz, Kamalinee Mukherjee and Prakash Raj in the cast. The structure has two registers: comedy and romance on the surface, political violence underneath. The narrative moves between them and the transitions are abrupt. The Naxalite movement is a long running armed rural insurgency in India; the film uses it as a character's past and does not go deeper into the matter. Pawan Kalyan is among the largest stars in Telugu cinema and the part is his known mould: a man who appears calm and turns to violence when required. The music is by Devi Sri Prasad and the songs were very popular at the time. Its limit is the balance of tone; the political strand is not taken seriously and the comic passages do not carry the weight of the narrative. Who it is for: viewers who like mainstream Telugu films and Pawan Kalyan. Who it is not for: it is long, the tone is scattered, and the political background is treated thinly.