Sufna (2020)
If you’re not familiar with India’s film industry, 2020’s Sufna is something else. Incorporating broad comedy, drama, melodrama and stringing them together with musical numbers, it’s not like the movies you’re used to. I’m not sure I’d select it as a good entry point in the Bollywood "genre" but if you speak Punjabi and you’re interested, check it out.
Orphaned as a child and raised by her unloving aunt and uncle (Seema Kaushal and Lakha Lehri), Teg (Tania Sharma) dreams of a life free from poverty. While picking cotton, she catches the eye of lazy Jagjeet (Ammy Virk). Although she eventually sees his past flaws and falls for his charm, their current financial situation prevents them from being together.
While Tania Sharma (or just Tania) and Ammy Virk aren’t names in North America, you can see why they’re stars at home. She's a striking beauty. Virk radiates charisma. You want them to fall in love, if only to see a great-looking couple. The drama of their situation gets you. Forced to stay at home while her cousins went to school, now picking cotton (which has a wholly different connotation in North America), but nonetheless filled with hope, Teg is a Cinderella. You don’t want her to wind up with a poor no-good-nick; you want her Sufna (dream) to come true. Even if she didn’t need a husband with money, it would do Jagjeet well to study hard instead of hanging out with his moronic best friends. A chunk of the film has all three of them vying for Teg's attention and their efforts are laughably entertaining.
Things change tone drastically when a villain (Mintu Kapa) is introduced. Was he really necessary? Didn't we already have enough going on? We haven't yet discussed the numerous musical numbers. They're all good so you'll be glad director Jagdeep Sindhu incorporated them but something should've been trimmed. Sufna runs a whopping 144 minutes - longer than the original Avengers! I know it's traditional for these films to keep you long enough in your seat for it to feel like an event but this is a relatively simple story. It shouldn't take this long to tell it.
Sufna has one of the strangest end credits I've seen in a while. When they begin, the text is shifted to the side to accommodate a music video. Once the song is done, the text stays where it is. I kept expecting something to come up but nothing did. I guess that's one way to get people to stay all the way through.
Although its story and leads are appealing, and the ending is so unexpectedly melodramatic it really grabs you, the scale of Sufna is too small to merit its overlong running time. It's a movie you'll only watch once but the music will likely stick with you and while it lasts, it's charming. (Original Punjabi with English Subtitles on the big screen, February 26, 2020)
