Movie Review - Weekend Love (Telugu) - Routine yet refreshing!!

You walk into the cinema with very low expectations, and the experience slowly turns out to be a bagful of surprises. Then you try to cherish every bit of it and pat on your back for your luck. But this effect becomes fleeting, and as film inches towards the interval you mellow down your expectations. Then again the film rises like a high tide, giving a flight to your imagination, and switching between a smooth and a turbulent sail to reach its climactic shore. This experience can be summed up in a phrase for a film’s title called Weekend Love.

The film is an assimilation of many stories that form the bone of contention for today’s youth as well as their parents. Amid all these, director Nagu Gavara manages to cook a fine broth of a love story – an archaic one set in a modern IT ecosystem. Ganesh (Adith) is a believer of casual flings and Sandhya (Supriya) is inclined towards relationships that stay from here till eternity. These two contrasting characters are colleagues in a software company. How they fall for each other and how Sandhya becomes a catalyst for change in Ganesh’s attitude towards life forms the rest of the story.

There’s a clear-cut demarcation between a love story and a moralizing love story. We have witnessed many films that revolved around both the genres. Weekend Love just tries to do a balancing act between the two. The outsider’s perception of software industry and its work culture has been elevated to next level and at the same time few myths got quashed. The major chunk of the film is laced with situational comedy and the quirky characters bring the house down.

Adith marks the arrival of another commercial hero; he also says that funnily in a scene. His dances and fights perfectly fit the bill and he shows a lot of promise for an actor who is one movie old in Telugu. He is in his elements and is the force behind the film. All through the film, Supriya struggles to fix the right emotions. She tries to look her character by wearing ethnic wear, albeit with low necklines. There’s a clear miss of a charm that defines her fragile nature. The supporting cast gets its part right with clearly etched roles.

Weekend Love also has its share of shortcomings. The scenes are so much stretched that you bleed from boredom to watch the inevitable unfold on screen. You want to count the minutes a bit faster to reach to the next scene. The age old tactic of a conflict resolution mechanism has been used to full force, thus opening the faucets of tears. Many such old school ways of film-making transform this seemingly fresh tale of love into a string of stale additives. However, the justification to every character with a proper arc makes this film a borderline preachy yet perfect presentation of a story that’s ridden with attitudes and behavioral traits of the present generation and ways to mend them before the imminent damage. Here, the writer-director tugs at your heart strings with his incisive dialogue.   

My Rating: 2.5 /5

This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.