Rating: **
Director Mahi V Raghav’s Telugu film Yatra 2 is no different from Yatra (which released in 2019) in tone and intention. The two films joined at the hip , have been made expressly to please the former Andhra chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy and his son the current CM Y S Jagan Reddy .
While other politicians are portrayed in a buffoonish blur, the father and son are placed at the centre of the visual hagiography, like a political pantheon, as frozen in immortality as any two gods from the holy scriptures.
For fans of Mammootty,there is no reason to bear with this flattering to the point of being obsequious , portrait of a political family . He has a mere fifteen-minute role as the senior Reddy with the corniest of lines to show his proximity to divinity.
When a poor couple(the poor, in such films about benevolent politicians wear tattered clothes and are often shown as physically disabled , financially f..ked, or both) arrives with a daughter who is aurally impaired , Mammootty orders his PA to sanction a 6-lakh grant for the surgery.
“Sir, we can use that money to help six families,” the PA chirps insensitively.
“Hold the little girl’s hand and say the same while looking into her eyes,” requests Mammootty, in his best hum-hoge-kaamyab voice.
The PA actually does what the CM commands.
The PA, and the poor couple, are in tears.
Soon after Mammootty is granted a hasty exit from the lachrymose script, Jiva takes over as heir-apparent. If Jagan is saddled with the thankless task of carrying forward his father’s saintly legacy, Jiva is no less challenged by Mammootty as his precursor.
The rest of the corny political parable could have been laughably laudatory had it not chosen to be so deeply offensive about the Congress , here referred to as the ‘Pogress Party’(I kid you not).
As portrayed by Suzanne Bernert, Sonia Gandhi is a mere cartoonstrip character: stern,obdurate, unreasonable and arrogant. Also, stiff, but that could be the actress. At one point in this pointless peregrination about Jagan’s padyatra, Ms Gandhi has a visitor.
“Can’t you see I am having my tea?” she reprimands her aide in her Italian accent.
Tea hee, to that.
My favourite unintentionally humorous sequence is the one where Jagan and his mother pay Soniaji a visit. Cardboard etiquettes have never been served up in such a flattening light before.
(The two father-son CMs’ wives are so shadowy they could be non-existent).
Not just Sonia Gandhi, all the other Congress, sorry, Progress party leaders are portrayed with equal impunity.
Nuances are alien to this political drama .With its steamroller attitude to Andhra politics Yatra 2 is as significant a political drama as the string of pro-government propaganda films on Kashmir, Kerala and what-have-you which have come out of the Hindi film industry lately.Goodbye, Gandhi.
