Shankar’s Career – With & Without Sujatha

Every director is bound to go through a rough patch in their career at least once. Sometimes, even a highly talented director may not update their storytelling skills with time, appearing outdated. Shankar seems to be experiencing one such rough patch.

Shankar’s recent release, “Bharateeyudu 2,” has been unanimously panned by both critics and the audience, who are appalled at the film’s cringeworthy writing and direction. Although Shankar’s last few films have not met audience expectations, people have clearly written him off after the negative reception of “Bharateeyudu 2.”

While many speculate on why and how Shankar seems to have lost touch with the audacity and originality that shaped his visual imagination, it is hard not to miss the absence of Shankar’s close collaborator, Sujatha.

Sujatha is the pen name of the famed Tamil writer S. Rangarajan. In addition to contributing extensively to Tamil magazines like Kumudan and Anand Vikatan, he also worked as a screenwriter. Shankar started collaborating with Sujatha in “Indian.” They worked together on every film thereafter until the writer’s untimely demise in 2008.

After “Sivaji,” the last film Sujatha worked on with Shankar, none of the director’s subsequent films impressed the audience as much as his earlier works did. Therefore, it is difficult not to draw a correlation to Sujatha’s absence. Many believe that Shankar’s visual grandeur found a balance in Sujatha’s emotional, character-driven storytelling. Without the latter, the former seems to be struggling to find its feet.

Lately, Shankar has been collaborating with Jeyamohan, another reputed writer, but they have not achieved desirable outcomes so far. In the Telugu film industry, we all know what happened when Trivikram stopped collaborating with Vijaya Bhaskar as a writer. Shankar needs to find a good writer soon, lest he fades into obsolescence.