Swaroop Kodur
Almost everyone is hopeful here. Veeranna (a wonderful Rangayana Raghu) hopes he can best his arch-rival Loki once again in the re-elections, his assistant Shankara hopes he will get some of the credit for that victory and Krishnappa himself hopes to become worthy enough to ask for his lover’s hand in marriage. Of course, everything depends on the arrival of that celebrity. But for Krishnappa, the assigned task also inadvertently becomes a journey into self-discovery and redemption, and by all means, the story is meant to do just that.Â
One of the charms of Moorane Krishnappa is that the writer-director does not impose a heavy plot in his material. The film exists almost entirely in the small moments doused in silliness which is both intentional and endearing. One might find the tone to be straight out of filmmaker Priyadarshan‘s oeuvre in that chaos unfolds leisurely and with loads of humour, with the story never really urging us to ask for anything else. And those laughs, especially in the first half, come in abundance and even though we know where exactly the story is heading, the characters keep us engaged throughout.Â
What Naveen Reddy does well for most parts is he simply lingers on those characters and lets their interpersonal antics dispense all the entertainment. He imbues the narrative with the rusticity of the Anekal region and almost transports the viewer to the town, letting the mundanities, the cadence and the general way of life of the people become the source of our delight.Â
There’s a character or two that often slips into a mind voice and spills out truth hilariously. There’s another that is perpetually so randy that it almost forgets its purpose in the film. Almost everybody has a quirk — our Krishnappa himself, we learn, has held a grudge for years together against a fellow townsman over a reason so juvenile that it could be straight out of a Tinkle comic. And yet, we laugh at it all because Moorane Krishnappa is a celebration of those peculiarities.