Sing Geetham (Telugu)
Sing Geetham gets whimsical very quickly. A man allergic to music crashes his car into the last surviving tree in his village when a song plays on the radio. A literal treehugger crawls out and demands an apology, not to her, but to the tree. An elderly woman speaks in gibberish, that makes you wait eagerly to eventually decipher.
When a spell is cast on the people of the village, making them sing every word they try to speak, the playfulness is amped up. People sing through confusion, romance, anger, grief.
Directed by legendary filmmaker Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, who is 94, Sing Geetham is very contemporary and nostalgic at the same time. It addresses complex themes like environmental destruction and tribal rights in a way that’s simplistic but imaginative, like a children’s book.
Prathap (Ayaan) returns to Kuberapuram, his parents’ village, for the land he has inherited. The entire village sits on gold mines. Renu (Shalini Kondepudi) and her father (Banerjee) are trying to sell off the mines to a man from Kenya named Swahili (Agu Stanley Chiedozie). Gauri (Ahilya Bamroo) wants to save the village’s lone tree from being destroyed to extract more gold.
There’s no edge, no bite to any of the evil. The film switches into a complete musical, but the dialogues are merely sung, not necessarily with musicality or lyricism. But none of this takes away from the constant inventiveness which hooks us.
There’s affectation in what is meant to look like villagers’ clothes and tribal accessories, and the way some of the performers speak. But it isn’t distracting, because the film is fantastical without hesitation, pleasantly unconcerned with realism.
The three main characters are played by content creators – Ahilya, Ayaan, and Shalini. All of them bring ease and lightness to their roles. Ayaan as a street-smart man trying to make some money, Ahilya as a brash and principled woman, and Shalini as the cold-hearted mining company owner.
It’s a bit hard to write about Sing Geetham without spoilers, not because of any shocking twists but the pleasant surprises scattered throughout.
The film keeps throwing something new and fun at us, but not with the mindlessness or disjointedness of doomscrolling, of which some Telugu films are increasingly being accused.
Sing Geetham is the first time Singeetham Srinivas Rao has made an original Telugu film in about two decades, with Sankalp Gora credited as the Executive Director.
In what feels like a phase of creative slump in Telugu cinema, star actors are often seen regurgitating their own classic dialogues and songs in their contemporary films, as if they have nothing new to say.
But the evocation of Ilayaraja’s music from Singeetham’s 1991 science fiction classic Aditya 369 in Sing Geetham doesn’t feel like a conceited fallback on past glory. The film elicits nearly the same wonder that his classic, innovative fantasy and comedy films like Pushpaka Vimana, Michael Madana Kama Rajan, Apoorva Sagodharargal, and Bhairava Dweepam, often acclaimed as ahead of their times.
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.
