Garadi review: Yogaraj Bhat’s film feels extremely outdated, unimaginative

Yogaraj Bhat’s Garadi starts off with the lofty intention of exploring a modern-day Dronacharya and Ekalavya dynamic, but just when the story begins to head in that direction, the film loses all composure and simply goes haywire.

In a sense, Yogaraj Bhat surely ‘attempts’ to make a sports drama that boasts an underdog, a full-blooded villain(s), and even an uncommon backdrop of rural, wrestling-loving Karnataka. But the film, on the whole, feels like anything but a sports movie because there’s just too much crammed into it that it is left with no identity. And this coming from the repertoire of Yogaraj Bhat, who is known to define his films with a lot of clarity and thought.

By all means, Garadi is a departure for the filmmaker but the problem doesn't necessarily lie there. It lies in the way the new subject at hand is treated and how it is devoid of the kind of nuance that he is extremely popular for. The film’s title refers to a traditional gymnasium where kushti wrestlers are trained and fittingly, the entire film revolves around the sport and its exponents. There’s the headstrong, principled village head coach Rangappa (BC Patil) who runs the Garadi Mane, but unfortunately he is under the thumb of the wealthy Raane family. The Raanes are diabolical, nasty in every way possible but Rangappa is forced to teach the two scions of the family because he badly needs a champion to emerge from Rattehalli, the said village.

On the other end are two siblings, Shankara and Soori, who are evidently more competent, but do not receive any training because of reasons that are best left undisclosed. Let’s just say a series of events leads to Soori growing up inside the garadi mane not as a wrestling contender but as an errand boy, the underdog. Little does Rangappa know that Soori has trained himself on the side and that he is far more skilful and prepped to bring that title back home. The underdog must rise and bring Goliath down but, of course, things often don’t go as planned in such scenarios.

To his credit, Yogaraj Bhat does a decent job in making a worthwhile sports movie at least for half of the runtime. There are obligatory scenes of honour, tradition, and dignity associated with the sport and also about the cheap antics that the bad guys use to get their way. There’s also a scene or two to reveal the good-natured hero, a scene for how the heroine chooses the villain over him and another to show how she comes around eventually. Sonal Monteiro has shown that she is a credible actor in films like Banaras but here, she is reduced to a bumbling, irksome Instagrammer who makes only bad choices. It isn’t that this half of the film isn’t riddled with problems and silly contrivances, but they are largely passable. Regardless, the sporting moments salvage the first half.

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The second half, turns out, is where things were meant to go wrong in the narrative and boy, they go wrong exceedingly. It almost feels like another filmmaker took over for these portions because the staging of the big moments, their execution, and just the manner in which the story is steered is beyond comprehension. The villains become increasingly crass and vile, the film is no longer about the sport, and the little dose of nuance we saw earlier is now a distant memory. The film then prods along in a cacophonous manner, slowly nudging us into submission.

One of the last straws, though, is the ghastly rape scene that occurs sometime in the second half and you are left bewildered to see something of this kind in a Yogaraj Bhat film. It isn’t just about the way it is presented and executed but also about the thought behind its inclusion in the script as a plot point. It’s hard to believe that the same Yogaraj Bhat who has delivered sensible films like Mungaru Male, Pancharangi, and Paramathma in the past would resort to reductive techniques to take his story forward. In fact, the film goes so off the rails that it eventually warrants a cameo from Darshan, who breathes some life into it.

Aside from that, Garadi, unfortunately, can be best described as an outdated film that has very little to offer, despite boasting a unique premise. It teases us as a sports drama but once you scratch the surface and look beneath, it’s a film that doesn’t trust its own dramatic core. Performances wise, Yashas Surya is good and affable throughout but that cannot be said about the rest of the cast which includes Sujay Belur, BC Patil, P Ravishankar, Dharmanna Kadur, and others. Sonal Monteiro does get an arc of some kind but it comes in a ‘too-little-too-late’ form for us to care.

One emerges from the theatre wishing to see Yogaraj Bhat return to his old ways but not without the creative risks he is required to take, especially when Kannada cinema is showing signs of a great bloom.

Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.

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