Keka - An ultimatum for Teja’s creativity
Film: ‘Keka’; Cast: Raja, Ishana, Anup Kumar; Direction: Teja; Cinematography: P.C. Sreeram; Music Director: Chakri; Rating: *
Producer-director Teja has returned to filmdom after a hiatus of three years and it shows in ‘Keka’ as it not in keeping with the current trends and lacks modern methods of storytelling.
The movie obviously is a mix of earlier movies made by Teja, which weren’t much anyway.
Teja started his journey in filmdom with 'Chitram' made on the line of immature teenage love. Later, he made the love stories 'Nuvvu Nenu' & 'Jayam', with which he raised the craze for his film amongst youth and carved a niche for himself as a director in the industry.
'Lakshmi Kalyanam', 'Oka Vichitram' the films which followed 'Jayam' failed badly. With this blow he took a gap of 2years. He returned back now with his latest 'Keka' introducing Raja (son or lyricist Sirivennella Seetharama Sasty) and Ishana as lead pair. Produced on Chitram Movies banner, the film is released on 23rd backed by lot of expectations cause of extensive publicity. Here we present a review on the film.
Story
The protagonist Arjun (Raja) goes for fishing with his friends. He meets Sujatha (Ishana) there, and their introduction blossoms into love. Sujatha’s parents are against their love and arrange her marriage with Kiran (Anup) who happens to be a close friend of Arjun. Learning about the marriage fixing, Arjun leaves for Kolkata just to keep away from Sujatha. There in Kolkatha a group tries to attack and kill Arjun. What is the reason for it? Did Kiran marry Sujatha? Was it a happy ending for their love story? To find answers to all these questions one has to go and watch Keka.
Performance of Artists
Raja son of popular lyrics writer Sirivennela Seetharama Sastry, is debuted as a hero with Keka. His acting is a mere ok and not filled with flaws. But his body language, costumes and hairstyle does not impress the viewers, in fact it’s very bad.
Ishana from Ajmer is introduced as a heroine. She is the main attraction to the film. Her portrayal of Sujatha is not so plausible. If she improves her acting skill, there are chances for her to get better offers. Dharmavarapu Subrahmaniyam & Rallapalli who appear regularly in Teja's films, are seen in a cameo and tried their best to deliver whatever they got within the allotted roles.
Anup as Kiran, Basha, Talaivaasal Vijay, Duvvasi Mohan, Moil Swamy, Vaiyyapuri, Bengali actor Nimmu Bhoumik have presented an average performance.
Technical Values
The photography of PC Sriram is the special attraction to the film. His work in featuring the songs is excellent.
For the first time Chakri has composed music for Teja's film. Although they are not very catchy, the songs are not cacophonous either.
Director’s Portrayal
For those who watched 'Chitram' and 'Nuvvu Nenu' the earlier films of Teja, will wonder if 'Keka' is made by the same director himself. He took 2 years gap to reconsider the points which failed the films he made before Keka. This time also he missed to focus on the script part of the film and concentrated only on music and photography in Keka.
While watching ‘Keka’ it makes the audience wonder whether the director has the stamina in him to deliver quality movies as he did earlier. He was incognito for almost two years and now his comeback doesn’t reflect much of an improvement in his directional skills.
Cons
Every time film goers expect an innovative story line but Keka has the same old story with a not so new screenplay. A bad flaw is that not even a single scene could reap applause from the audience. Comical attempts by the new comers doesn’t evoke laughter but is simply disgusting
The serious dialogues delivered by the heroine sound funny. Kiran's character looks childish and immature. Although the technicalities are good, they are wasted cause of the void in script, the film appears as a soulless body.
Criticism
One was expecting director Teja to comeback refreshingly different after his long penance but alas! The maker didn’t understand the core concept of film making even after this break and did Keka in the same dud formula. The scenes that are projected on screen are senseless and boring one after the other. In short, Teja’s Keka is one more dud that desperately fails to impress. It just reaps an ultimatum for the creative director.
Bottomline -It’s just not worth your time
Cast: Raja, Ishana, Anup Kumar, Dharmavarapu Subramanyam, Thalaivasu Vijay and others
CREDITS: Cinematography: P.C.Sreeram, Music director: Chakri, Editing: Shankar, Choreography: Shankar, Suchitra, Lyrics: Veturi, Seetarama Shastry, Chandrabose, Executive producer: K Jagadeesh Reddy, Story, screenplay, dialogues, produced and directed by: Teja
Jayaprakash Reddy, MS Narayana, Srinivas Reddy, Jeeva, Prudhvi, Shravan, Raja, Chaitanya, Raja Babu and Jr. Relangi
Aksha - although this is her first film as a heroine, she did well in sentiment scenes and song sequences.
