Rating:** ½
Coincidentally I saw Vadh 2 , with a strong subtext on casteism, right before Dhandoraa, the strongly coded anti-caste film which took the boxoffice by storm and is now available on Amazon.
Dhandoraa, true to its loud intentions, is a shriek of protest against the caste system. It is pronouncedly over-punctuated . The plot is crammed with characters who underline the theme of caste discrimination. Writer-director Muralikanth Devasoth’s narrative takes its own time to gather its wits.
Once the lines of morality are less hazily drawn, the going gets less tough. By the end of it, the father-son melodrama had me misty eyed and choked.
Dhandoraa tries to say a lot more about the caste system than it needed to. It should have stuck to the core theme of an estranged father and son. Sivaji as the tainted patriarch has an amazing arching character arc which takes him from a bigoted honour killer to a compassionate feminist and a repentant father.
The actor is excellent in spite of the unnecessary noise and distraction around him . His relationship with the spunky sex worker Bindu(Sreelatha) is the most memorable part of a movie that insists on shooting itself in its foot time after time.
The father-son axis with Vishnu playing Sivaji’s son Nandu needed more space to breathe.Here too an irrelevant track about Vishnu’s combative wife gets in the way. The defining relationships are stifled by the director’s righteous indignation. The hectic hammering of the social message brings the film dangerously close to being labelled propagandist.
But the core integrity of the endeavour rescues the morality tale from turning into a pulpit message .With less pamphleteering and more of intrinsic emotions being accentuated ,Dhandoraa could have been the stand-out film it was meant to be.
