Super Subbu, if only silliness were sexy

There is a certain charm, albeit an aloof kind, to Telugu’s big screen star Sundeep Kishan playing a sexually curious duh kind of guy who gets pushed around by everyone. It is the kind of role that stars do when they are satiated and smug with success. Like Charlize Theron playing a scarred serial-killer sex worker in ‘Monster’.

The world applauds an established star when he or she comes down from the high horse. To be fair, Sundeep Kishan is a hoot as Subramanyam Chillukuri Rao, aka Subbu, a perpetual underdog who desperately tries to escape his strict father’s prudish expectations. His life takes a chaotic turn when he is appointed as an adult sex education officer in the conservative rural village of Maakipur.

Evidently, this is a series about sex education and therefore about sex, right? But here is the catch. There is no sex, not even an element of naughtiness. The sex-starved boys get turned on by Tamil song sequences with heroines in wet sarees. This is the serial’s antidote for pubescent libidos.

And the closest Subbu comes to a cry-out-loud moment of ecstasy is when his girlfriend (Maanasa Choudhary) takes Subbu to a deserted construction site and puckers up for a kiss… that never happens.

The series never really lets us feel the weight of sexual repression. The director, Mallik Ram, treats the subject as an occasion for humour, which is fine provided the content is willing and able to buy into his sexual theme.

‘Super Subbu’ feels like a pre-teen introduction to the forbidden ‘s’ world. It is all surface, and not a very gleaming one at that. There is borderline naivete to the proceedings that would have been cute if handled sensitively. But the execution of the subject is unmistakably annoying.

Sundeep Kishan struggles to inject some life into his limp character. It feels like blowing air into a punctured balloon. Mithila Palkar as a struggling small-town actress is spunkier, probably because partially she continues to be a struggling actress in real life. There is an early sequence where she is supposed to weep over a deceased relative. Mithila kills it.

Sadly, the laughter is meagre and strictly rationed. The series exudes the scent of a sambharised ‘Panchayat’ with the characters groaning for the giggles. The opening sequence where a sex-education teacher is tied to a tree and beaten by the villagers is how I felt while trying to make myself believe that this is all naïve, innocuous fun.

It probably is. But is that what we had signed up for?