Love is tortuous and torturous

Mugila Chumbana *Kannada (U)Director: B ShankarCast: Raghuveer, Shravanti, Shakuntala, Srilalitha, Rajanand, Ashok Rao, Shivaram and others

America-returned MBA graduate Harish assumes charge of his father's garment factory. Mindful of his principles, values and outlook, he doesn’t like to see younger sis in minis or his sister’s friend Sangeetha driving irresponsibly. 

He prefers to see his sister get married but fate intervenes and he chances upon the photograph of a girl who, by the time he goes to meet her, is dead. Sangeetha meanwhile has to fend off anxious parents and sympathetic maternal uncle’s attempts to see her settled in matrimony. She takes Harish’s help, but only by lying. He finds out and is furious. 

R N Jayagopal, Vijayanand, P K H Das... all stalwarts in their fields, came together to work on this film, starring Raghuveer, who’s still remembered for his Chaitrada Premanjali these many years ago. 

The results are there for all to see. RNJ pens some simple beautiful and meaningful lyrics to late 80s and mid-90s music that relied heavily on beats and the piano. 

Das shows the once-clean streets of Bangalore, its burgeoning, god-forsaken place like outskirts, Chetak scooters, Ambassador heavies and Maruti 800s in awful lighting, which makes a good camouflage for sneaky couples in the theatre to continue their activities unmindful of discovery. Or interruption. 

There’s no respite for the viewer in the story, written by Raghuveer himself. 

The sequences are disjointed and after a while his uniform expression of constipated misery becomes too much to bear. The above-mentioned strands of the story could have been woven better, if only to serve as a reference point for how some mindless stories of the past decades were made.

But that is not to be. As such, Mugila Chumbana remains as elusive as the first kiss between the rains and a parched earth during droughty summers. 

A word for the Chamber: Do not allow release of films languishing in cans for the sake of some obligation or the other!