Manoj Kumar’s Premada Oorali is a box-office wonder that perhaps no one saw coming. The Kannada rural drama has emerged as one of the biggest success stories to come out of the industry this year, and it’s not difficult to see the appeal of the construct.
A widowed father (Rangayana Raghu), who runs a sweet but robust farm in rural Karnataka along with his son (Shree Raam), wants an educated daughter-in-law to complete their family. The family drama starts off by leaning on the sensibilities of a feel-good comedy of errors, which is a possible reprieve for action-fatigued audiences. But it inevitably settles for a grating loudness that’s difficult to overlook — in its writing and its narrative framework. But that’s still not the most concerning part of this box-office wonder.
There’s a half-decent plot in there about a father’s angst in raising his son right. Naganna (Raghu), who is still wracked with guilt and resentment over past mistakes, wants his son to grow up to be a more patient man. He showers the motherless child with love and instils in him a sense of integrity, creating enough room for honesty to make even difficult conversations between father and son feel easy. “My son shouldn’t be like me,” he reminds himself, and the audience is eventually let into Naganna’s dark past. But this arc never gets the revolutionary payoff we expect.
This close-knit family also includes Vasantha (Ramika Shivu) — the subtitles make it offensively clear that she’s a “tomboy” and you better believe there's going to be makeover scene — a niece who is practically one of their own and, more importantly, serves as the film’s frenemy-turned-lover archetype. When Santhosh is torn between his love Rukmini (Thapaswini Poonacha) and his father’s insistence that he settle down, a conflict occurs. And then some.
The problem with Premada Oorali is not really that it’s too basic in its approach. It draws on some well-worn tropes in the Indian film playbook, chief among them a painfully predictable love triangle. The real problem lies in the writing, which seems to believe it is forward-thinking in its treatment of marriage, love and premarital relationships, when its ideas are, in fact, deeply problematic. As the furious, asinine men judge women for autonomy over their lives and bodies, the film gradually joins in, leaving us physically recoiled.
It slathers sentiment on regressive ideas of marriage and purity, to a saccharine assembly line of songs. This is also when something becomes suddenly clear. The entire film is shot like scattered episodes of a high-pitched television soap. The editing is choppy, the dialogue is absurdly dramatic and more importantly, the scenes are constructed to go viral as vertical videos perhaps specifically among those who find their worldview in moralising Whatsapp forwards.