Andhra Pradesh

A flick for the frontbenchers

Film: Mangatayaru Tiffin Centre

Cast: Mumait Khan, Shafi

Direction: Venky

A title like Mangatayaru Tiffin Centre and a story set in a village with Mumait Khan in the lead role sounds interesting but unfortunately the filmmaker does his own damage by dressing up the item girl from head to toe and giving her a very dull and prosaic role. The drama is not only unexciting and predictable it is topped with one dimensional characters a few men in the village whose job is hang around her, fantasize and lust for her. The plot is all about why Mangatayar u (Mumait) comes to a village to eke out a living. There are no bombastic dialogues written for her, all the lady does is dress traditionally and deck her hair with kilos of flowers and then serve ‘tiffins’ to her only male customers unwary of the eyes locked on her. The first half of the film is filled up with dream duets with each of the customer and post interval turns mildly interesting with Bhadra’s (Shafi) entry.

There are too many characters in the film and each of them takes their turn to bore you. Ali makes a brief appearance and Krishna Bhagwan has not more than two scenes in this slow and long drawn out film. Surya, Suman Shetty, Laxmipathy Ranganath, Sudha and a bevy of character artistes make merry in this film. The characters don’t grow and we know nothing more about them even after a couple of hours. It seemed like there was nothing to say and most of the time, the director just threw in some odd songs and bland one liner to kill some time. Also there is no novelty and scenes like Draupadi Vastraharana are a straight lift from some previous duds. If the director stuck to Thadi Balram’s original script, the movie could have had some future.

Y. Sunita Chowdhary

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu