How not to make movies and irritate audiences

There are movies that astonish us with their finesse as there are those that do so with their HQ or humbug quotient. Bodinayakkanur Ganesan falls in the latter category.

A protracted and a hopelessly predictable plot, over-the-top melodramatic sequences, dialogues that lack brevity and gaping holes in the screenplay’s logic are some of Bodi...’s minuses. A voiceover at the beginning of the movie, probably that of the director’s, asks the viewer not to confuse the film they are about to see with a Bharathirajaa movie. He need not, the viewer would have found that out minutes inside the movie.

Bodi... simply fails to make any effort to engage its audience. After all, how would it if it comprises scenes where the hero, Ganesan (Harikumar), suffers a series of epileptic attacks, but recovers the very next instant (even Maggi noodles takes 2 minutes to prepare!); the villain, Thiruvachi (Ravishankar), a local don chases and hunts hogs in sewers for food, but kills a municipality official when he exterminates one of them (PETA, are you reading?); the animosity between Ganesan and Thiruvachi, despite the former loyally selling hooch and ganja manufactured by the latter, is never explained. “All because of incidents that occurred 15 years back,” Thiruvachi, whose expressions fluctuate between a guffaw and a grimace, utters constantly, throwing a hint that a flashback is imminent. The flashback does occur eventually, whose utility is nil.

Ganesan gets attracted to Raji (Arundhati), a nurse, who repulses his initial advances, but falls in love with him later. Thiruvachi too has an eye on Raji, thus completing the love triangle.
However, Bodi... has some genuinely hilarious scenes involving Harikumar and Soori, which are, unfortunately, few and far in between. The hills surrounding the town of Bodinayakkanur have been captured on camera in their pristine glory.

In one scene, Thiruvachi after reading about an achievement of Ganesan in the papers, thunders, “How the hell did it happen?” We would like to ask the director how the movie happened.

Rajagopalan Venkataraman