One Cut Two Cut (Amazon Prime; Kannada)
Starring Danish Sait,Prakash Belawadi,Samyukta Hornad
Directed by Vamsidhar Bhogaraju
Rating: ***
Danish Sait is a natural-born comic. We saw that recently in Applause Entertainment’s political satire Humble Politician Nograj where he played a vain cheesy immoral politician.
In this sporadically-amusing satirical film Sait is Gopi, an arts and craft teacher in a rundown school where all the students have gathered in one classroom as attendance is Covid-challenged. This confined space gives Sait’s comicality a comfortable positioning. He can be funny to his heart’s content without the plot and characters running all over the place.
One Cut Two Cut is very modest in its means and ambitions. It has no real agenda except to make us laugh.This, it does but not often enough. Admittedly the writing(by Sait and writer director Vamsidhar Bhogaraju) is sharply satirical times, woefully generic at other times. This inconsistency precipitated more by lack of fund than absence of creativity,is the film’s biggest undoing.
But when the wit is acerbic, the film is killingly funny. There is an ongoing gag about a protester’s aversion to all things Amitabh Bachchan that is genuinely funny.In fact Mr Bachchan figures prominently in the scream of things.And Prakash Belawadi who cannot stop disliking the Bachchan for an imagined hurt, is a hoot as a protestor who along with his friends, holds the class of dimwitted students and educationists hostage.
There is some pertinent comment on the news channels’ obsession with trivia: rather than cover a protest march, a young female journalist is sent to sent to the CM’s home to spotlight the CM’s daughter doing the hoola hupla.
The problem here is quite simple. The entire joke hinges on one man’s ability to hold the audience. Besides Sait, the rest of the cast is purely functional barely managing to hold their place in the plot as the edges of the storytelling get too slippery to hold on to.
There is also a subplot about Gopi being rejected by a prospective bride’s parents and the bride (Sanyuka Hornad) turning up in the classroom as a teacher.The romantic track is accompanied by some tacky music tracks which further slide the show into a cheap-thrill abyss.
Luckily for the film Danish Sait’s pidgin English is a hoot. I could shut my eyes and just hear this glib talker take off on the wings of a wacky word-trek . By the time the hostage situation gets resolved , with the CM’s intervention(no less) I wasn’t sure whether I was laughing with or laughing at this homage to silliness.