meganbmoore | tollywood: Magadheera

Magadheera is a Telugu film about reincarnation, evil beards, taking on armies singlehandedly, significant hand touching, Love That Cannot Be, and walking through fire. There’s also a scene where apple=woman is used for the heroine to reclaim her agency during a testosteronefest. (Actually, there’s a lot of declaring/reclaiming agency be her in this movie, even if most of it is about her love life.)

Mitravinda was a princess 400 years ago who was in love with Bhairava, the greatest warrior in their kingdom. She trolls him for kicks when she’s bored and has a giant oil painting of him in her room (the girl is seriously hardcore about this love thing, and doesn’t care who knows, but without coming across as desperate or clingy), who finds the trolling fun, and likes to lurk just outside her bedroom door for various reasons. But theirs is a Love That Cannot Be because he’s her bodyguard, and because all the men in his family die before they’re 30. Except, apparently, they die because they’re so devoted to the royal family that they do absurdly dangerous things for the kingdom? It seems that marrying the future queen would fix that. But there’s an invading army, and Mitravinda’s spurned suitor, Ranadev, who has an Evil Mustache, makes it all turn epically tragic. (As revealed in, like, the first scene.)

They get reborn as Indu, a university student, and Harsha, a stunt biker. Ranadev trades in the Evil Mustache for an Evil Beard and gets reborn as Raghuveer, and is still obsessed with getting in Mitravinda/Indu’s pants. Harsha and Indu meet when he accidentally brushes the hand of a whiteclad woman and ZOMG! knows she’s his true love. Except he didn’t see her face, and by the time he catches up with her, Indu is wearing a black coat, and she’s more than a bit suspicious about the dude looking for her claiming to be her long lost boyfriend. So she decides to troll him in this lifetime, too, and string him along until she figures out whether or not he’s a psycho stalker. Things are going along all cute and fun and mostly fluffy, and then Raghuveer does evil spoilery things, and suddenly theirs is a love That Cannot Be.

I could post pictures and say more, but dangermousie has two huge screencap reviews here, and here , and

shewhohashopehas one here with bonus vids. They are extremely entertaining and extremely spoilery.

The characters and plotlines are pretty straightforward in both the past and present, but the movie was extremely fun. I also apparently took around 1000 caps (I automatically cap as I watch things if I watch on my computer and it’s almost 3 hours long.) A few icons I made from them: