Ganesh_reviews_in_detail : Baby (2023)
A flawed movie about flawed characters! Spoiler-FILLED review!!
Reiterating that this is a spoiler filled review.
We hardly remember the hundreds of good guys we come across, even tend to ignore them but we are always aware of and (sometimes) glorify the bad guys. The bad guy makes people talk, everyone knows about him, there is always some drama around him. This is how I got introduced to this film. Almost all people around me were talking about the film after its release. Thanks to the diverse opinions it drew.
I googled Baby and the only face I could recognize was Anand Devarakonda. Reviews weren’t so great either and I was procrastinating on this movie since I had many better ones waiting in my watchlist. However, true to the saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity, I sat down to watch this movie after being repetitively asked whether I have watched it. By the time I finished this movie, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quote - There's only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Given the way how social media has given a spin to marketing, the quote is the gospel truth for show business like cinema.
So what makes people talk about Baby? At a macroscopic level, it is the flawed characters. Since eternity, stories tend to assume a morally superior ground by default. You have the good guys and bad guys. And the good wins over evil. This winning can either mean killing the bad guy or just defeating the bad guy in something. Otherwise, you got “bad” good guy, who undergoes a character arc and becomes a “good” good guy. Some stories take this too far and end up becoming moral science classes. In all these, the common thread is that the storyteller takes a certain moral side.
Baby is none of the above. It is simply a story about flawed characters, behaving as they are and how they turn out to be. The storyteller just narrates a story. At a microscopic level, I felt that this movie does not feel obligated to obey the conflict-and-resolution template. Almost every story out there will present the problem and the story mostly ends with the problem being resolved. Baby does not care about this. Whether this redeems the movie in its climax is debatable, but director Sai Rajesh Neelam is certainly confident that he said PACK UP at the right time.
Such an approach to the movie makes the premise sound unique despite the story falling into the cliche love triangle bucket. A woman at the center of this triangle is a smart choice (as it would evoke more talks around the movie in a patriarchal society, thus more publicity) and casting a terrific performer like Vaishnavi makes the character solid. The other two leads’ performances pale in comparison to hers with the only grace being Anand, the better actor, having more screentime than Viraj. This can also be a consequence of the fact that the movie is slightly lenient towards Anand’s character despite aspiring not to be so (and reallly GOOD music score for his part of the story).
Such flaws in writing become minor ones when you have major ones which just scream lousy writing all over. Supporting characters are SO one-dimensional that they are established with just 1 scene and repeat their dialogues/actions for rest of the movie. While a lot of effort has gone into writing Anand and Vaishnavi (to the level it gives us a headache), the movie hardly cares about Viraj for most of the time before suddenly upgrading him as a lead (in the last hour) and desperately attempting to give him equal impetus so that the movie becomes a love triangle.
No, the “love” is not sudden. It was in the background showing clear signs. However, he was just treated like a supporting character (yea, ridden with stereotypes and lacks nuance) for most of the time. Unfortunately, Viraj doesn’t have the acting chops to make us buy into his love story either. Vaishnavi’s flaws fuel this love story but it’s simply not enough. Direction doesn’t help in most of the places except for 2 scenes in the second half - the love making scene and the climax confrontation (Pic posted above).
Just when I thought a scene, or say the climax, is building into something great, it breaks into a scene inspired by (or resembling) instagram reels and left me in splits! That served as a funny reminder to multiple serious scenes which made me go WTF?! as they were too low hanging a fruit and thus made me realize how lazy too the writing is. The fact that the characters are simply named after actors that play them should have given me some sort of heads up ;)
All in all, Baby is a wasted opportunity due to lackluster writing, very ordinary performances and not juicy enough staging to tap into something as fickle and complex as the human nature, which always always offers huge scope for drama. Could have been miles better.
Hello reader! In case, we have not met ..
I am Ganesh and I love talking, reading and writing about cinema. You can read more about me here.