The Verdict: The Rise And Rise (And Stumble) of Allu Arjun’s Pushpa

Pushpa: The Rise (Amazon Prime/In theatres)

How do you turn a postural defect into a superhero stance?

In Sukumar’s blockbuster Telugu hit about a sandalwood smuggler, the protagonist Pushpa keeps his left shoulder up. Bullied as a child, he developed a wonky half-hunch that makes him look strung up from one end. Played by the dizzyingly magnetic Allu Arjun, that off-kilter shoulder becomes iconic, a stance that plays into the way he talks, the way he dances, the way he fights. It is a built-in meme, one that allows anybody to imitate Pushpa  — and therefore everyone has, from international cricketers celebrating wickets to the film’s heroine Rashmika Mandanna in the song Saami Saami. Genius.

Pushpa The Rise released on December 17.

Nobody, of course, can do the shoulder quite like Arjun, who combines it with two other mannerisms that would be commonplace in themselves: wiping his beard with the back of his hand, and crossing one leg over another whenever he sits down. Sukumar and Arjun turn these movements into moments of extreme and compelling swagger, and it is that amplified swagger that defines Pushpa: The Rise. This is a hard film to resist.

Pushpa: The Rise is the unfiltered decoction of the Telugu masala movie, demonstrating why the genre — of antiheroes and violence and charisma — exerts such a powerful hold on audiences, and why Telugu hits spawn endless Hindi remakes, all of which now seem watered down. Made on exceptional scale, with a banging soundtrack and creative action sequences, everything about Pushpa has personality: right down to the fight choreography. There’s innovation to the characters, the dance moves and to the hero’s strategic gambits as he rises up the sandalwood-smuggling ranks.

And then there’s Allu Arjun. Grizzly, grungy and unflatteringly hairy, his eyes do the heavy lifting. The actor has an incendiary screen-presence, and his Pushpa exerts a musky charm. The film discards vanity, working harder on the hero’s style than on the hero looking good — something Hindi cinema desperately needs to learn — and it makes no bones about Pushpa’s moral decay. The more power he amasses, the more grotesque he becomes. We may root for him, we may pretend to be him for a laugh, but we can see the sandalwood starting to rot.

The metaphor could not be clearer. This hero is crooked.

The Most Surprising

Oo Antava Oo Oo Antava

An absolute highlight of the film and of Devi Sri Prasad’s soundtrack, Oo Antava is a striking contradiction, an anti-item item song, a sexually charged and performed number that criticises and mocks the male gaze. Samantha Ruth Prabhu is dynamite in the song sung breathlessly by Indravathi Chauhan, but the lyrics by Chandrabose make the song truly unique.

“They slay me with their looks if I wear a saree,” go the Telugu lyrics, “They undress me with their eyes if I wear a skirt.” So much for victim-shaming. Repeatedly emphasising how twisted men are, Oo Antava says they will ogle at women no matter what they wear, if they are dark or fair, or what they look like: “If we’re chubby they call us cute, and if we’re lean they’re crazy about us.”

A fierce Samantha takes charge, in complete and dominant control of the song, frequently looking directly into the camera — almost as if daring the gazing males to break away from her captivating eyes. The actress, who had never performed a showstopper like this, faced flak in the press for “a song like this” after her recent and much-discussed divorce. I believe Samantha should be applauded for leaving her comfort zone with such style. She’s refusing to be boxed in while encouraging women to shame the objectifiers instead of the ones being objectified. It’s the ultimate ‘revenge dress.’

The Worst

Pushpa: The Problems

Pushpa may be an antihero, but his ‘romantic’ track with Rashmika Mandanna’s Srivalli is the film’s biggest failing. It begins coyly, with Pushpa too shy to even see if Srivalli glances at him. His sidekick bribes Srivalli and her friends (who need money for the worthiest of causes, to watch a new Chiranjeevi film) to make her look at Pushpa, but this escalates awkwardly, and distastefully, to Srivalli being coerced — despite her visible discomfort — into kissing Pushpa for money.

Allu Arjun and Rashmika Mandanna in Pushpa The Rise.

She flees in alarm, but a few scenes later, we see Srivalli knocking on Pushpa’s door, begging him to spend the night with her. The entire angle is rather icky and — in a film otherwise potently aware of its strengths — it feels distasteful and unnecessary. Like Pushpa’s shoulder, it should have been left alone.