Review bheemasena nalamaharaja (kannada)

Producers - Pushkara Mallikarjunaiah, Rakshit Shetty, and Hemanth M. Rao.

Director- Karthik Saragur

Star Cast- Aravinnd Iyer, Priyanka Thimmesh, Arohi Narayan, Achyuth Kumar
Genre- Social

Rating- **1/2

Platform- Amazon Prime Video

Complex & Complicated!

Jyothi Venkatesh

The film which is being streamed on Amazon Prime Video now is about a chef and his troubled marriage with his wife who has had a traumatic childhood. If you wonder whether it is a mythological film with a strange title like Bheemasena Nalamaharaja , it refers to two famous male cooks from mythology- Nala, who is said to have written the first ever book on cookery and Bheema who disguised himself as a cook when the Pandavas went into exile .

Though it is a fact that the slow pace of the film and the adult Vedavalli’s shrill characterization make it extremely difficult to stay invested, to the credit of Aravinnd Iyer who does his best with what he’s given, the movie manages to keep you engrossed to a large extent on its own complex and complicated steam.

The movie begins with Sara Marry (Priyanka Thimmesh), who is a young caretaker at an old age home. Now she seems like a happy-go-lucky girl, who is always cheerful when it comes to caring for the elderly. She is forced to take a break from her work by her supervisor and packed off to a hilly resort called Nadi Moola.

Sara meets the resort cook Lathesha (Aravind Iyer) to thank him for serving a delicious biriyani on her arrival. Sara gets drawn into his tragic romantic story involving his former guest at the resort, Vedavalli (Arohi Narayan), a food-lover.

The invisible thread that binds both Lathesa and Vedavalli is food and they seem to be perfect for each other. Vedavalli loves to eat and Lathesha lives to cook and feed, though strangely enough, you never see him taste his own food or relish it. He derives happiness from the happiness that others feel when they eat the food that he prepares.

Lathesha who has grown up in an orphanage home, has this reoccurring dream of his mother cooking food and feeding him with her own hands, while Vedavalli who loses her mother at a very young age due to her father, grows up hating her father Varadharajan Iyengar (Achyuth Kumar), a gifted baker and that traumatized her for life.

While Aravinnd Iyer is excellent as Lathesha and injects his soul in his performance, Arohi Narayan who plays Vedavalli, a disturbed and difficult young woman, is par excellence as an actress who lives her role. Chitrali Tejpal who plays little Vedavalli, is impressive. As an obese child who loves her food and fights back her tyrant father (Achyut Kumar), she is very expressive.

Though it is a fact that the slow pace of the film and the adult Vedavalli’s shrill characterization make it extremely difficult to stay invested, to the credit of Aravinnd Iyer who does his best with what he’s given, the movie manages to keep you engrossed to a large extent on its own complex as well as complicated steam.

All said and done, to sum up, I’d say that though the plot digresses from time to time with its own flashbacks and the narrative too goes back and forth in time, revealing bits and pieces of the story, and the editor ought to have edited it crisply to make the film palatable, director Karthik Saragur ought to get a pat on his back for his unique inimitable way of storytelling.