Pawan Kalyan : To Change or Not To Change

Pawan Kalyan : To Change or Not To Change

God once told me when I was dreaming about him: “Why should you worry about my dice playing capabilities. Why can’t you just accept things as they are and move on?”

Of course I am sure He was referring to the Einstein remark there but I am sure He wouldn’t mind it if I applied it to the movies of Pawan Kalyan. God created Pawan Kalyan and gave him a distinct personality. However when it came to choosing Pawan’s audience and fans, God assumed they should be like the rest of the mob. No different.

The result is pretty apparent for everyone who has been following Pawan Kalyan since his Tholi Prema. Pawan Kalyan’s era is divided into two parts now. Post Tholi Prema and Pre Tholi Prema. The Pre Tholi Prema version of Pawan Kalyan was not someone you could write home about. However the paradigm shift in his image and the quality of his movies started with Tholi Prema and was perfected by the crew of Khushi.

So that was what God might have said during Genesis. “Roses, Roses and More Roses” for Pawan Kalyan. However what is life without a little sinusoidal reversal of fortune?

He roared, “Let there be a Johnny”. And there was a disaster. The rose marathon had ended. It had given way to the thorn. At least that was how most PK fans felt.

Subscribing to a radically different school of thought (but not necessarily a superior school of thought), I found Johnny to be the best movie in PK’s career in terms of technical finesse, direction and treatment. The story had no takers in Andhra Pradesh but that doesn’t mean it was a bad film. Sometimes you have a perfect script and a perfect movie but the audience denounces it completely. Then you get into the dangerous art of introspection and come up with reasons why the movie did not work.

Almost all these introspections generally contradict the analyses in the pre-release reports. The pre-release report says that Scene-119 was great because it was handled different. The introspection report says that Scene-119 was the main reason why the movie flopped. The scene was handled messily.

Johnny suffered a fate it should not have. It went into the annals of history as a movie that didn’t and couldn’t. I would rather list it as a masterful movie that misguided Pawan Kalyan.

The reaction to Johnny made everyone sit up and notice Pawan Kalyan. Everyone was commenting how Johnny should have been made. In fact Jeevi of Idlebrain.com opined that the movie should serve as the textbook of “How Not to Direct a Movie”. The assumption was that the audience wanted a “normal” movie. Experiments were OK as long as they fitted broadly into the framework evolved over the years also known as The Formula of Telugu Movies.

Johnny challenged The Formula. It went against the tide. And it drowned. The unsinkable Titanic had finally given in. Pawan Kalyan registered a flop, one of colossal proportions and he himself was responsible for it. It was a great movie with perfect treatment and excellent performances. The only drawback was that the audience did not understand what the movie was all about. They wanted to see Pawan Kalyan and were disappointed because the script rose above the star in this case. The love story was tender not loud. The chemistry between the lead pair was remarkable but not flashy. It was a subtle expression of celluloid magic not the pretentious cacophony of cliché-ridden Formula.

The disaster of Johnny caused another twist to Pawan Kalyan’s career. He realized that he had to stop trying for the perfect movie. All he had to do was to come up with a movie which would be liked by his fans. He had this obligation. He had to satisfy them. Though he had never conveyed to anybody that he would follow The Fomula, he had to finally succumb to the pressure of his fans. In my opinion this was the greatest damage done by Johnny. The financials are of course important. However instead of persisting with the new wave of cinema and making a bold statement to the world that he would not change, Pawan Kalyan chose to shun it all and try treading the beaten-to-death path.

Of course, nobody could change overnight. Pawan Kalyan also had some inertia and his next release, Gudumba Shankar, was at best described as a half-baked product which tried to do justice to both his heart and his mind. It was a clear case of confused loyalties. It was neither here nor there. Though financially it fared much better than Johnny, it still was a flop.

The public opinion was subtle but clear. No one shall rise above the Fomula. He should respect it. Gudumba Shankar was the last nail on the coffin of the creative genius in Pawan Kalyan. He went back to his Tholi Prema director to give him a face-lift. He stopped his quest for meaningful and creative cinema.

God has finally succeeded in changing him according to his fans.

Balu – ABCDEFG, a movie which is not half as good as Gudumba Shankar, tasted success at the box office. Finally the ordeal was over for Pawan Kalyan. He can now churn out meaningless Formula pictures and get hits under his belly. But there are some people in this world who love him for what he is capable of; who like offbeat movies like Johnny. And these people are going to be disappointed because their only hope had given in to the pressure of the box office. It is sad that Pawan Kalyan left it all after just a couple of duds.

Balu may be a sound hit. Balu may bring back smiles on faces of the distributors. However for serious movie fans, Balu is a routine movie and Pawan Kalyan has become a routine star just like his big brother.

Sometimes I want to scream, “If I want to see a mass thriller, I will go to a Chiranjeevi or Nagarjuna movie. I don’t want Pawan Kalyan donning those roles.”

God tells me as-a-matter-of-factly, “I don’t play dice my boy! I really don’t”. I want to believe Him. He really knows what He is doing.