Sogasu Chooda Tharama

1995 144’ col/scope Telugu d/s Gunasekhar pc Snehanidhi Films p K. Ramgopal dial Ajay Santhi lyr Seetharama Sastry, G. Vishwanatha Sastry c Sekhar Joseph m Ramani-Prasad lp Naresh, Indraja, Annapurna, Tanikella Bharani

When a lowly paid engineer (Naresh) finds himself in debt as a result of his lavish lifestyle, his wife (Indraja) bails him out by starting a home-based saree-dyeing business. Earlier, the independent yet traditionalist character of the wife was established when she offered her future husband a dowry that she raised against a personal bank loan. The ‘offbeat’ film includes scenes in which, faced by a rape attempt from her husband, she threatens to kill him, and ends when he, chastised by his wife’s initiative, finally ‘accepts’ her as an equal. The director’s earlier Lathi (1992) had been critiqued for betraying an excessive influence of his mentor Ram Gopal Varma. That influence continues to be in evidence in the depiction of a lavishly shot, low-lit world of domesticity. The domestic here is curiously shut off from the world outside, emphasising instead its effort to suture female sexuality and woman’s economic independence into a traditionalising narrative about the ‘new’ woman in the context of a consumerist middleclass. It also had a successful musical score.

Film