Mata (film)

Mata
Directed by	Guru Prasad
Produced by	R Srinivas
Starring	Jaggesh Sudarshan Tabla Naani Biradar Mandya Ramesh Nani Pari Goturi
Music by	V. Manohar, Udayaravi
Language	Kannada

Mata (Kannada: ಮಠ) is a Kannada movie written and directed by debutant director Guruprasad. It is a black comedy, aiming to inform public about the happenings within contemporary matha/mutts, the sacred institutions in India.

Plot

Movie starts with a driver Upakathe Venkatesh Jaggesh welcoming Sister Martha (played by Pari) to Bangalore. He needs to drive her to a Matha in Shimoga and to make the journey interesting, he tells a story, interspersed with sub-stories.

The fore-said matha has asylum taking care of handicapped Orphans and rare temple of Lord Brahma.

He narrates about this Mata, whose Chief is a skirt-chaser and goes to the extent of playing Flute to girls over phone, just to impress upon them. The Chief decides to part with the post, in order join his wife back.

In unique circumstances, the manager and Administrator of the matha, Appayya, (Sudarshan) advertises in NewsPaper declaring Vacancy for "Chief of Matha". In unique way of narration, Appayya declines to read out the dialogues which declares Chief of Matha is vacant and an Ad in the paper needs to be placed. Director GuruPrasad makes an entry bombarding Appayya to enact his role, as he is paid to do just that viz., read out the dialgoues.

The introduction scene of the film is fabulous as all the characters are invited with vedic hymns ,"Asathoma Sargamaya", that signifies the light in all directions. Thabla Nani as Venugopala, Sudheendra as Chintamani, Shashidhar Bhat as Shashidhar bhat, Mandya Ramesh as Mandya Nagesh,Vyjayanth Biradara as Kosta Jaggesh as Venkatesha take the film on their shoulders.It is a great master piece,that has every essence from crisp dialogues to a meaningful and soul scrippling script.

The character;'s are neglected by the society,their quest for a societal status and food drives them to do all kinds of things to just remain in the training period as they want to avoid being foodless. The comedy scenes involving nagraj murthy as a Muslim king brings great hilarious scenes that signifies the hold on making the audience waiting for the intuitiveness of the next scene.Sudarshan has given a great modification of a cool head who always emphasize dharma, Managers role orchestrated by Sadananda is at his comical best.

It is an eye opener to all the present day directors that a cinema is not a bundle of songs or locations instead it is an introspecting field where a societal message should be given to the public at large.

Hero Jaggesh and 6 other people each representing kaama, krodha, lobha, mada, moha and maatsarya make it to the tentative list.

Film traverses their journey towards becoming Swamiji [Chief of Matha]

Critical reception

It got favourable critical reaction and it did pretty well at the box office.

Trivia

• Matha is 100'th movie for Jaggesh and 200'th movie for Vyjayanth Biradar (known as Biradar)
• Because of this movie of high standards, Guru Prasad & Jaggesh's combo's next movie "Eddelu Manjunatha" has lot of expectations which released in early part of year 2009.

External links

• Hindu review
• [1]
• [2]