Balagam excavates the humour and pathos of death

Rating: ** ½

A death in the family triggers off a chain of reactions, some genuine, largely artificial. Writer-director, Venu Yeldandi tries to capture all the humour and hysteria, all the bickering and the playacting that are unleashed keeping in mind the solemnity of the occasion.

The trouble is the mood of exacerbated emotions, floods into the narration so torrentially it is hard to tell which of the two is more hysterical: the  characters or the way they are projected into the tragic circumstance.

Everyone is hamming. So is that the chosen mood of the characters? Or are these simply bad actors giving bad performances making the characters look more melodramatic than they are meant to be?

The shrieking and breast-beating are enjoyable for a while. But then the theatrics refuse to go anywhere. The interweaving of the characters’ bereavement, fake or otherwise, lacks any shred of grace. It is essentially a  free for all, and fun only if you are a fan of the Ramprasad Ki Tervi brand of  ghoulish humour.

Sadly, the death-related jokes in Balagam  are  more foolish than ghoulish, more madcap than  sensitive.  The writer-director is convinced that one death can set off a chain of events and that one person’s death  is  an occasion for the family to lose all self- control and squabble dramatically. A daughter-in-law  brings  up her husband’s share of  the family property.  But  in time at all, she is sobbing in repentance .

When the raunchy grandfather Komurayya (Sudhakar Reddy) dies suddenly, he leaves behind a family of belligerent relatives. The only one who exercises remarkable self-control in the midst of the loud melodrama is Komurayya’s son Ailayaa (Jairam). This is the only performance that  shows any restraint. Every other actors pulls out all stops, drenching the  drama in a torrent of theatrics.

The deadman’s grandson Sailu (Priyadarshi) is grieving more about his interrupted marriage than his grandfather. Towards the end, his priorities change. Sailu suddenly becomes the weeping warrior. The family shrieks, weeps, shrieks some more. There is no element of a deeper understanding of tragedy and bereavement beyond the surface squabbles and bickering.

Finally, it is up to a sulking crow which flies overhead in sullen protest, to put an end to this family’s wailing woes. Balagam tries hard to be funny  about bereavement. But the thing about family tragedies is that they are amusing only to the  outsider. In this case, even objective bereavement is  a far cry.