I caught the movie on TV today, having seen it for the first time ages ago. Starring Naresh and Poornima, along with a host of ‘character actors’ like Sutti Veerabhadra Rao, Nutan Prasad, Srilakshmi and Rallapalli, the movie has a rather complicated plot.
Naresh is an idealistic young man who works in the ‘city’ (I think Vizag, I’m not sure) and refuses to take a dowry. Poornima is a young girl who refuses to marry anyone who wants a dowry. Perfect, huh? But they don’t know each other. Poornima writes a louu-letter to an imagined Mr. Right, for the sake of a bet, and sends it off to an imaginary address. Naresh gets the letter and falls in love with whoever wrote it (she signs herself ‘Sony’). Meanwhile, Poornima rejects yet another sambandham, and comes to stay with her sister in the city. She meets Naresh on the bus, and then discovers he lives in the house opposite her sister’s. She falls in love with him and he likes her too, but a scheming typist in his office gets her sister to pretend to be Sony and make Naresh fall in her net (valalo vesukovatam, it is called. Don’t you snigger.) Naresh tells Poornima he is in love with a Christian girl, so Poornima goes away broken-hearted and agrees to marry the non-dowry-taking boy her parents have found for her. Meanwhile Naresh’s brother, who comes to the city to meet this Sony, smells a rat and follows Sony, discovering the truth. Naresh, broken-hearted, agrees to marry the girl his parents have found for him. Naturally, the match has ben arranged between Naresh and Poornima. When Poornima sees the groom, she refuses to mary him, thinking Naresh is in love with another girl. Naresh goes to thank the bride who refused to marry him, finds out it’s Poornima, asks her why and clears up the misunderstanding, telling her about the letter, and finding out that she is ‘Sony’. So the wedding is back on, and Poornima, getting ready, notices the missing diamond in her ring, and remembers that she swallowed it to commit suicide when she hadn’t wanted to marry Naresh. While everyone is panicking, her father reveals that it wasn’t a diamond, after all, because he couldn’t afford one. So the wedding is back on again. But Naresh’s father is angry at this attempt to cheat them, and calls off the wedding, till he is blackmailed by everyone into agreeing to it. And so, finally, they get married.
Add to the above Naresh’s sister-in-law (Srilakshmi), who loves to watch movies and tell people the stories (starting from the titles, with dialogues, songs and fights all included), his sister, who loves to experiment with new dishes and feed them to unsuspecting people, his father, who wears his anger on his nose (mukku meeda kopam), his brother’s card-playing buddies who only need a flat surface to start playing cards, his peon from office, who loves liquor and lies in equal measure, and his boss who is a non-Telugu (and who is discovered to speak Telugu, nonetheless, at the end of the movie) whose laugh portends disaster, and you have Srivaariki Premalekha, in a nutshell.
Um. A rather big nutshell. With a lot of nuts in it.
But the movie really is testament to Jandhyala’s comic genius. There’s subtle satire, like Srilakshmi’s movie mania originating from her lack of productive employment, and the difficulties of a dowry-free marriage. There’s bold political statements, like Poornima, at a pellichoopu, telling the dowry-seeking groom to go stand at the santha two villages away, because there he will fetch a good price. There’s pathos – Poornima’s father remembering how they were worried when she turned two without ever speaking a word, but now are worried that she speaks too much. There’s plain old jokes, Naresh’s father cursing his elder son’s friends with a “may your funeral pyres be lit with your playing cards”, only to have one of them ask “how did you know that would be my last wish?”
And not a scene where you don’t smile at something or the other. They don’t make comedies like that any more.
