Pokiri

Pokiri (2006)

Written and Directed by: Puri Jagannadh
Starring: Mahesh Babu, Ileana, Prakash Raj

Pokiri is undoubtedly a benchmark in Telugu cinema, and a lot of us have seen the movie countless times. One huge factor is the dialogue of the film. Not only in Pokiri, but in a lot of Puri's films, there is this style of dialogue. In Pokiri, almost every dialogue that Mahesh Babu says is a punch. Sometimes, they're so on the face, like the famous, 'evadu kodithe...' and sometimes, it's subtle, where in the opening scene Subbaraj says, 'nee perentra', and he responds, 'peru chepthe kani thannulu thinava'. He almost never answers a question anyone asks, and even when he does, he says something unexpected. I feel like Puri has this natural instinct of writing dialogue where before he writes a dialogue, something comes to his mind, and he goes, not this, this is a normal response, we need an absurd response here. And somehow this doesn't even feel forced. 

Another very interesting aspect about the film is, Ileana's character. The film is centered around Pandu, a bad guy, which is what the film is centered around. We see his life, the consequences of his action. Ileana's character is a beautiful subplot which explores a different facet of a bad guy - how does it feel to fall in love with a bad guy? It's charming initially, but when you later get to know him better, it's confusing. The brain and heart conflict with each other. She's heartbroken throughout the second half. There's this terrific scene where she has this intuition that he is around, and I feel that women can sense things like this, they have this intuition. And Shruti has so much conviction on her intuition that she says that if she's wrong, she'll forget him. And yet, he lies to her face. That's what I love about this film, it seems like a hypermasculine film, but even Ileana's character and her plight is explored beautifully.