Drinker Sai movie review: Old wine in an older bottle

Each time as you gear up to watch a new film that visibly follows a familiar template, it’s important to let the optimism guide you from within. ‘Surely they aren’t making all these efforts just to say the same things all over again,’ you tell yourself as you check in. Something similar happened this morning as I sat down to watch Drinker Sai, the last Telugu film release of this year which tells yet another story about an aggressive man in love and a timid woman too scared to say no. I tried my best to remain hopeful about the final output, but little did I know the industry was saving the worst for the last. 

Directed by Kiran Tirumalasetti, Drinker Sai has little novelty to offer. While Sai (Dharma) is an uber-rich orphan with nowhere to go, Bhagi (Aishwarya Sharma) is a spunky medical student. Their paths cross in the most cliched of fashions, and Sai falls for Bhagi hook line, and sinker. A large part of the film’s early portions is spent on the miscommunication between the two, where Sai mistakes Bhagi’s coy avoidance for her approval.

Director: Kiran Tirumalasetti

Cast: Dharma, Aishwarya Sharma, Posani Murali Krishna, Srikanth Iyengar, Kirrak Seetha, Funbucket Rajesh, SS Kanchi, Bhadram

Yet, what’s somewhat impressive about the pre-interval portions of Drinker Sai is its unabashed energy, a quality particularly shining through in its musical sequences. The first half of the film contains five song-and-dance sequences, all of which have plenty of vigour, choreographed with a similar zest. Sri Vasanth's melodies keep one engaged and entertained. Dharma, playing Sai, is an energetic dancer, and the director makes the best use of his talent. Up until the one-hour mark, the film is disjointed and haphazard, and yet offers some amount of fun, largely because it seems self-aware of its light-hearted tonality.

While most of the jokes are stale, and the plot progression conventional, you sense some spark in the character sketch of Bhagi, who happens to be a fan of Brijdi (Bhadram), a naturopathy expert who specialises in digestive system. When Brijdi arrives at her college, Bhagi’s excitement, and comically over-the-top scenes, make for a few amusing moments. You wonder if the film will attempt to make more space for these quirks, amidst a hackneyed narrative. Alas, after those few initial moments of humour, the film denies us any pleasure of such sort. The narrative hits its first low point at the interval mark, where Sai borderline threatens Bhagi with self-harm, and it only gets progressively worse from there. The writer-director doesn’t spend any time trying to establish its conflict points, instead the makers hop around from one scene to another with zero coherence. Instead of focusing on how Sai deals with the rejection, the narrative dreadfully veers into a bizarre set of subplots that include Brijdi randomly plotting against the well-intentioned and ambitious Bhagi. By the time the film reaches its final act, it reveals its true ambitions of being a tedious and moralistic PSA campaign about alcohol.

Among the many things Bhagi realises in the final act, one of them involves her friendship with a classmate whom she saw as a brother-figure, while he secretly harboured sexual desires for her. Earlier in the film, we see a man in his late 30s meet Bhagi for a marriage prospect. Even as he looks at Bhagi, his mind is racing with lustful thoughts while he is surrounded by his family members. He didn’t have to be a pervert, yet the writers chose this detail. Amidst its desperate attempt to justify Sai’s behaviour and change our opinion of him, the film ironically ends up giving a reality check to the women watching it.

In what’s undoubtedly the most bizarre movie subplot of this year, a criminal entrusts Brijdi to reform his wayward 11-year-old son, also named Sai (Raja Prajwal). Brijdi, in turn, commands Bhagi and her friends to do the needful. A few moments later, we see Junior Sai beating up and cursing the three young girls, yelling profanities at them and comparing them to porn actors. It’s not just the idea of this scene that bothers, but also the way the filmmaker executes this sequence, shooting the female characters with an excruciatingly objectifying gaze. The grating turn of events don’t end here, as we later see Junior Sai being thrashed by Sai, who does it in order to ‘reform’ him. The director could have established the hero’s supposed ‘good intentions’ in any other manner, yet the way he incorporated these visuals of violence towards a child speaks a lot about the lack of self-awareness or sensitivity at display here. Not that any of these scenes add much to the narrative, but there’s a strangely perverse element to these moments which the audience never recovers from.

Besides his infectious dance moves, Dharma fails to add anything to the film with his hammy portrayal of Sai. Aishwarya Sharma, on the other hand, looks believable as a coy yet bright-eyed college girl, and delivers a decent performance. However, nothing suffices to salvage the glorious, discomforting mess that Drinker Sai is. Hard pass.