Ek Gujarati Bollywood pe bhaari!

Frankly I havenrsquot seen a more dramatic interval block for a movie than Laalo ndash Krishna Sadaa Sahaayate 2025 by far the highest grossing Gujarati film ever that drops on Sony LIV March 6Forget hookcliffhanger the movie altogether transitions to an unrelated genre at its midpointUp until then Laalorsquos a darkish solecharacterdriven survival drama about an alcoholic autorickshaw driver stuck for days without food and water inside an isolated farmhouse that therersquos somehow no way to escape from Think of it as a semirural version of Vikramaditya Motwanersquos Rajkummar Rao starrer Trapped 2016 if you may Itrsquos believable Contrary to popular perception mdash while India is indeed the worldrsquos most populous nation mdash in terms of density of population it doesnrsquot even figure in the worldrsquos top tenThere are enough stretches of uninhabited land even right outside cities that if yoursquore holed up in a box mdash you may never find help to get out of However as the timeline hits 114 in this twohours 15 minutesrsquo film Lord Krishna manifests himself on earth mdash quite simply switching Laalo into a fullon devotional drama already packed with bhajans love ballads and a raasleela songsequence when the said flip occursldquoI never thought of it this wayrdquo Ankit Rekhaben Sakhiya 29 director of Laalo tells me when I bring this up For this debut feature all that Ahmedabadbased Ankit was seeking was a location camera and an actor that could sufficiently serve as audition tape for his subsequent script that required a heavier budget ldquoConversations with God came into Laalo only much laterrdquo he saysThe first thing you notice about the film is the sheer number of blessingsthanks in its longest opening credits making me wonder if itrsquos crowdfundedldquoThese are mainly friends relatives yes You take a single name out and Laalo wonrsquot be possiblerdquo Ankit reveals of how one of them offered a couple of lakhs without any possibility of return and yet another passed on their Enfield Bullet to use as propThis is common for an amateur first film Only thatrsquos not how it turned out for Laalo that entered theatres as any other nondescript lowbudget pic playing in Gujarat in October 2025 Few bothered By week four there was a widespread mass movement around itWhile Ankit had held screenings for select ldquo300500rdquo audience members to spread the word before release mdash the turning point as he recalls it was a lady who posted on social media that if you donrsquot catch Laalo yoursquoll upset Lord Krishna himself Watch it literally for Godrsquos sake There was a scram to post similar reviews online By the end of its run in early 2026 Laalo produced at an approximate budget of Rs 50 lakh had registered footfalls so huge worth over Rs 120 crore mdash first Gujarati film to breach R100 crore at the box office mdash the Mumbai movie industry and the mainstream press began to deem it as the rise of Gujarati cinema itselfTop Bollywood producers extended invitations to meet Ankit He recalls ldquoKaran Johar Jeetendra Nikkhil Advani Siddharth Roy KapurhelliprdquoI first heard of Laalo from Subhash Ghai who later had Ankit over to talk at his film school Whistling Woods What did these biggies tell him ldquoThey congratulated and asked me to remain as I amrdquo Which is what Ankit intends to do ldquoStay true to my maati soil and culturerdquoIrsquove watched Laalo in Hindi Thatrsquos what I prefer for Indian movies Yoursquore welcome to feel offended by this unpopular opinion mdash somehow Hindi dubbed well doesnrsquot sound odd even in a Tamil picture unlike say an Italian Korean or Hollywood productionAlso Gujarati itself is not as different from Hindi That could be why there hasnrsquot been a Gujarati movie industry to rival the likes of Bengali or Marathi for that matter Obviously money canrsquot be an issue in GujaratThe only Gujarati films Irsquove watched lately are the early works of actor Pratik Gandhi Abhishek Jainrsquos brocom Be Yaar 2014 and Mikhil Musalersquos mysterythriller Wrong Side Raju 2016 The former was locally gamechanger enough to land Gandhi the latter produced by Phantom Anurag Kashyap et al in MumbaiLaalo is warmly set in Junagadh close to the village Mehtakhambhariya where Ankit was born He schooled in Surat before reading civil engineering in Anand Hersquos been dabbling in short films even a webseries since from Ahmedabad along with similar aspirantsOne of whom is debutant actor Karan Joshi who plays the eponymous lead mdash the autorickshaw driver who takes a passenger Shruhad Goswami also named Laalo on a daytrip of his hometown ldquoLaalo is what you generally call babieskids in Gujarati like lsquoLaddoo Gopalrsquo for Lord Krishnardquo Ankit saysFor the most part I saw the multigenre Laalo as a swiftly narrated film about a troubled romance between the protagonist and his wife Reeva Racch At its core though itrsquos on the ills of daily drinking I guess thatrsquos kinda appropriate for the prohibition state of GujaratMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper