Vedha (Kannada, Zee5)
Rating: ** ½
It is difficult to like Vedha. It is a film about sex crimes against women and children, and not a very subtle one at that. It plunges into the darkest recesses of deprivation and emerges with visuals and dialogues that are not everyone’s cup of ghee.
There is something palpably primeval about the way the father-daughter pair played by Shiva Kumar and Aditi Sagar, swing into action against their tormentors. The two are on a killing spree and their victims are so despicable, they deserve their sticky deaths.Writer-director shoot the father and daughter like two caged animals who have just been unlocked to prey on their enemies. Indeed, there is something predatory about this pair as they rock the boat out of a sense of despair.
I’ve never seen the killer instinct so quantified and unleashed in a feast of fury that the squeamish would definitely find distasteful. The stylized action sequences are the film’s highlights. And if you are not into operatic bloodshed then this film will put you off all action films.
I found the film use of colour and choler(anger) to be fascination. Cinematographer Swamy J. Gowda blends bloodshed into a ballet-like ritualistic slaying . The father and daughter hunt down the villains like animals. And that’s what their deeds show them to be.
I also liked Vedha’s relationship with his firebrand wife Pushpa, played with perky panache by Ganavi Laxman . She is a bride with a missing husband whom Vedha marries out of a masculine sense of duty, little knowing that she throws the sickle across the room with a daunting aim.
Whether it is Vedha’s over-the-top grandmother or his spouse-taming wife, the women are shown to be fierce fighters in Vedha. And yet they are often shown to be raped and tortured mercilessly. This is the irony that the film is not able to traverse smoothly.
While it is heartening to see women have their identity in a a movie mired in the musk of masculinity, it is not easy to watch women being raped and tortured and killed every 15-20 minutes just so that the plot gets felled for further action.
Not quite as trashy as some other recent vendetta films, Vedha suffers from serious pangs of male guilt. It also structures itself with unnecessarily convoluted flashbacks which do not give away anything except a propensity for retro-mayhem.