Every confidence game starts off in a very innocuous fashion, with small talk or a call for help (for directions, or to get out of danger) to lure the mark in. Once a sense of familiarity is established, the ruse opens and the gullible mark is made to walk into it with eyes wide open. A sleight of hand follows and the sinister plan is finally revealed, by which time he is right on the "X marks the spot", unable to stop the inevitable nor affect the impending. And before long, the game is over, the lights are turned on, everything goes as per plan and the mark is said to be "had". "matthu vadalarA" (not the movie itself, but the execution of the it) is a beautiful con game. It gets the audience in with a promise of a good show, and begins the proceedings in an amateurish fashion, lulling it into giving it a wider berth. As time ticks on, what seemed amateurish shows its true colors in a dazzling fashion making a claim that everything - the reatively new cast and its off color acting, the low hanging jokes, the easy oneliners - has been intentional right from the start to serve as a misdirection to the ensuing clever plotting and the hilarious writing. And when the rug is finally pulled from under the feet of the audience (and the wool off its eyes), it cannot but get up, laugh off, dust off and applaud at the bravura performance put up by the team. Even with its share of conveniences and coincidences, "matthu vadalaraa" is a clever piece of scripting, intentional with its innocence and confident about its con(fidence). It is quite a rare feat for a telugu movie to dabble in the meta (EVV did it to a certain extent) and the movie has some hilarious pieces hidden in plain sight (ex: the scrolling news in the climax, the vintage movie posters) for repeat offenders. Though the meta doesn't add much to the main proceedings, it again reveals the one thing the entire premise has been built upon - CONFIDENCE.
It is heartening to finally see moral ambiguity take root in the current crop of telugu cinema, where the villain's motivation is no better (or no worse) than the hero's (to its credit, this one steadfastly steers clear of the hero and the villain labels to start with), and "matthu vadalaraa" even says it so loud and clear towards the reveal that the characters are merely rungs away from each other on the moral relativity sliding scale. Sriram Raghavan (whose "Johnny Gaddar" poster adorns the ramshackle wall of the protagonists' living quarters, another movie about questionable characters indulging in nefarious schemes) , the current master (and a worthy heir of the yesteryears Vijay Anand) of 'sketchy characters stuck in seedy situations' genre, proves to be a wellspring of inspiration for the makers of "matthu...", painting their characters with the same invisible unapologetic ink that reveal the ugly side of themselves when held against the bright light of morality. While not exactly noir, "matthu..." inches closer to it and if not for the hilarious sidekick character chiming it with zany zingers at regular intervals, it would have truly approached the "Andhadhun" territory. Though the writing gets (and should get) the lion share of the credit, the background score is in lock step with it, accepting the gauntlet and raising the pulse with each beat. Such was the confidence of the makers that once the ball gets rolling, graphic novelization suddenly comes into the picture (ala Kill Bill's Yakuza massacre sequence), the frame rate switches to high speed against a "Que Sera Sera" background, the main action gets constantly intercut with a hilarious TV serial and many such nice floursihes. Talk about double dipping and triple dipping in multiple genres! "matthu vadalaraa" is as much about its characters as it is a big shout out to the audience, urging them to look past bright colors of obvious to enjoy darker shades of the obscure! Clap! Clap! Clap!
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