Samantha’s Subham Is The  Best Prescription for Laughter 

Samantha’s Subham Is The  Best  Prescription for  Laughter 

 Rating: *** ½

For those of us who had given  up on hearing the genuine sound of laughter in movie theatres, here is hope. Subham is a farm-fresh funny free-fall on the  pitfalls of television-serial obsession circa the 1990s when  Ekta Kapoor  was the queen  of  home entertainment.

Subham  could be seen as a slanted  homage to Ekta  Kapoor’s stronghold on television audiences at one time.I remember how addicted my 9-year  old daughter was to Kahani Ghar Ghar ki(8.30 pm weekdays) followed by Kyunki…Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi  at 9 pm. She would throw a fit if, God and Ekta Kapoor(which were the one  and the same  when it came to televised offerings) frowned  on the satellite space and if, gulp, the  telecast of the nation’s hope-dope  soap was  affected.

 This is the world director  Praveen Kandregula  and  writer Vasanth Maringanti inhabit with liberating insouciance . There is an unsettling and yet reassuring  casualness in the way the writer-director  merge  the serial  obsession among ladies in the 1990s  with a flippant horror-dom which is supremely giggle-gorged  and never dumb.

 Smart writing makes these  smalltown characters  in Subham feel real and likeable. The newcomers and semi-newcomers  are so into it,  it feels like they belonged in the  sleepy Andhra town  long before the camera caught them.

Our “hero”,  if we  may call him that, is Srinivas played by Harshith Reddy who has  the most sincere  face  on this side  of Mohammed  Zeeshan Ayyub . You know from the start, this guy will believe his newly married wife Srivalli(Shriya  Kontham, sweet and spontaneous ) is “possessed” by her  favourite serial and will go  with her mood swings.

Partly a satire on the  killer serials  of  the 1990s  and partly a homage to the  hyphenated  hilarity of  humour and horror at its most basic(you know, the Stree structure)  Subham is  a delightful melange of mirth and madness.

 My favourite  chunks in the narrative are those where the timid Srinivas and his aggressive buddies  Shah Jehan(Charan Peri) and  Venkatesh(Gavireddy Srinivas) discuss their views  on  an alpha male and how to apply their concept of ideal malehood into their marriages. In the naïve folds of  masculine kinship, the  tongue-in-cheek plot  implodes with  peals of laughter.

 Besides the vivacious cast who have a  blast, Subham  leans  into  the  1990s easily, not  over explaining the periodicity . There  is  an element  of  treading on untrodden territory here, not quite  achieving the pathbreaking heights of  the director’s earlier  film Cinema  Bandi , but  still  providing  ample evidence  of  originality  and freshness.

 My  favourite  character in Subham is the mysterious  godwoman  Maya, played by the film’s producer Samantha, who seems halfway clairvoyant , halfway money-hungry  and  fully  wacked out. A full movie on this  character? This, I have got to see.