I have a trip to India coming up at me, and as all of my travels, this too has me in the clutches of crushing pre-travel anxiety.  I decided to watch a movie and picked the 1978 Kannada movie Parasangada Gendethimma starring noted Kannada actor Lokesh.  The movie however left me with deeply mixed feelings, which I'll come to, in a moment, but before that, I must note that this movie showcases some of the best casting and acting I've seen in a long time.  Each and every person does full justice to the screen time.

Thimma aka Gendethimma is a village-based door-to-door salesman.  Whether it is spices or trinkets, he's the go-to man; the villagers give him lists of their requirements and he delivers it to them on his next visit. Thimma is set to be married to a city girl.  Now, this 'city girl', Marakani, is one who is modern by village standards (of the seventies) and finds herself aspiring to be more like the actual city dwellers, who she realizes are more polished than she is.  Needless to say, her modern outlook and aspirations, however conservative and reasonable, seem excessive and unacceptable to her mother-in-law who is quite rigid about who the head of the family is.  She even insists that her son hand over all of his earnings to her, rather than his wife, and that causes the inevitable friction.  Before long, matters come to a head and and Thimma and Marakani move out, to live on their own.

Up to this point, I rather liked the narrative, and could empathize with the daughter-in-law, and hoped that the movie would lead to reconciliation and a happy ending.  Instead, the director brings in a city teacher who hails from the same village as Marakani, and sparks fly between them.  Marakani starts having a torrid affair with the teacher, with disastrous consequences for both Thimma and her.  After Thimma catches Marakani with her paramour, both of them end up committing suicide, being unable to face their respective lives in the aftermath of this incident.

What left me sorely disappointed was that the movie never had a turn around moment;  Marakani was being accused of being a shrew from the word go, even when she was being perfectly reasonable, and then, when she has the affair that ruined her life and that of her husband, one can feel the invisible director tut-tutting, along with the villagers with their archaic notions and hangups, who with their prejudiced minds had passed their judgment on the fate of the marriage and the villainy of the 'modern city girl', long before things soured up.  The movie ended without any reconciliations and without anybody growing wiser.   I felt that the scriptwriter/director could have done so much more with the story and put a positive spin to it.  This movie was probably made during a time when tragic stories were deemed intelligent and is a tale of finger pointing and with a heavy dose of 'I told you so' attitude that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.   Am I viewing it from today's perspective and not from the period perspective? True to some extent perhaps, but on the other hand, those times needed the positivity and out-of-box thinking even more. The director, I feel, was a douchebag who simply pandered to the sentiments of people who believed that women had to be 'put in their place'.  In the process, he has wasted a wonderfully talented cast who have put in some brilliant performances in this movie which could have been so much better.  The movie fetched Lokesh a well-deserved Best Actor award at the Karnataka State film awards.