Peddi: Strip away the sentiment and what remains is a film that normalises assault

On paper, Peddi had everything to be a landmark film. The intent was there, the subject was there. The emotions, the technical craft, the powerful lead performance, all of it was there. But somewhere in the process, someone decided the film also needed a romance track to guarantee commercial success. That one decision unravels a significant portion of what the film was trying to be, and it made for one of the most uncomfortable theatrical experiences I have sat through in recent memory.

Telugu cinema has talented writers, actors, technicians and directors. It produces films of genuine scale and emotional intelligence. But there is one area where it has shown almost no growth across generations, and that is how it writes and films women. Watch enough recent Telugu releases and you begin to wonder whether anyone in the writing room has ever had a real conversation with a woman. We have to be honest about what is actually happening. Which brings us back to Peddi.

The moral foundation of the hero

Peddi, plainly put, is a story about dignity. Specifically, it is about a man who refuses to accept that his village, and the people in it, deserve to be invisible. Appalasoori, played by Jagapathi Babu, has spent thirty years trying to get the village officially named, to get it on a map, to make the government acknowledge that the people living there are citizens with rights. Peddi picks up that fight and decides to win it through sport. The film asks you to root for this man because he understands, in his bones, what it means to be unseen.

Ram Charan in Peddi.

Which is why what happens the moment Janhvi Kapoor walks into the frame is so jarring. Because the man who will spend three hours fighting for his people’s right to be seen cannot bring himself to see the woman in front of him as a person.

SPOILER ALERT!

The introduction shot of Achiyyamma, played by Janhvi Kapoor, has her removing her dupatta and standing there, trying to make a point about how she can gather the crowd for votes. For the next three minutes, the film cuts between her body and Ram Charan’s reaction to her body. Slow zooms. Lingering holds. The scene has one purpose and it is not to tell you who Achiyyamma is. It is to show you what she looks like and to make sure you understand that Peddi finds her desirable.

Three minutes is a long time to spend looking at someone without once showing their face. Try to think of another recent Telugu film where a male character’s introduction was handled this way. You will struggle to find one, because the camera does not typically treat men as collections of body parts to be inventoried. This is what the male gaze looks like in practice.

The scene that follows the introduction is where the film’s attitude becomes impossible to misread. Peddi tells his friends, plainly, that a woman from Achiyyamma’s background would never agree to be with a man like him. Why? She is from a higher social standing and he knows the gap. And his conclusion, stated without particular shame or hesitation, is that since she will never be his anyway, he will simply touch her. If something goes wrong, he says, you only live once.

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Ram Charan and Janhvi Kapoor in Peddi.

His friends push back, reminding him that it is wrong to do so. However, he dismisses them. The film does not present this as a warning sign.

There is also a recurring detail throughout the romance track where Ram Charan’s character puts his hand down his pants whenever he sees Janhvi Kapoor. This happens more than once, presented as character colour. It is worth sitting with what is actually being normalised in these scenes, because the film certainly does not sit with it.

What Peddi does

Peddi jumps up the wall to enter Achiyyamma’s private space and touches her without her consent. The film frames what happens as an accidental kiss, a moment that just occurred, something not entirely deliberate. This framing is doing a lot of work that it should not be doing.

Also Read: Peddi movie review: Ram Charan carries a worthy but uneven sports drama on his shoulders

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When she fights back, he runs away. Neither the scene nor the events that follow acknowledge that a violation has taken place. When Achiyyamma tells someone close to her what happened, she is told two things. That what happens in private should stay private and that her honour is now at risk. The concern is not that she was touched without permission. The concern is what people might think of her if it gets out.

This is a specific and recognisable logic. It is the logic that has historically been used to keep women silent after they have been violated. The film deploys it here and moves on.

The campaign scene

Achiyyamma campaigns publicly for her father during a local election. Her father is running against a candidate backed by Rambujji, played by Divyendu Sharma. Rambujji, threatened by how well she is connecting with voters, comes up with a plan. He and his people will cut her skirt while she is on stage, publicly humiliating her and destroying her campaign. They proceed to do this.

Janhvi Kapoor in Peddi.

Peddi intervenes at the last second by cutting a tent rope that covers her before the skirt falls. This is played as a hero moment. The intervention leads to a confrontation and a fight sequence.

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Let that sit for a moment. The hero, who was doing the very same thing moments earlier in the name of love, saves the woman from a form of sexual humiliation. The film treats this as heroism. It does not notice that the rescue and the threat exist in the same moral world, one in which a woman’s body is the battleground for men’s disputes, and the best outcome she can hope for is a man who takes her side. Neither Peddi nor Rambujji face any consequence for anything in this sequence or anywhere before it.

Later in the film, Achiyyamma pieces together that Peddi is the man who entered her space and touched her without consent. She confronts him and slaps him. His response is to tell her that this was his way of expressing love. Other people write letters or bring flowers. He touched her without asking because he wanted her.

And then she kisses him. The film lands on this as the natural, even sweet, conclusion to their story together. Peddi is not the first Telugu film to do so, and sadly, it is unlikely to be the last. Bollywood has been telling versions of it for decades. So has Tamil cinema. But the particular packaging here, wrapped inside a film that is otherwise asking you to care about human dignity, makes it harder to stomach than usual.

Uppena, Buchi Babu Sana’s debut, was a genuinely well-made film. It won the National Award for Best Telugu Film and was celebrated widely. It also featured Krithi Shetty, who was 17 years old during filming, in a romantic role where she was pursued by an older man whose obsession the film framed as devotion. The way she was filmed, the way her resistance was treated as a temporary obstacle, drew some criticism at the time. That criticism did not meaningfully slow anything down.

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When a director faces no real reckoning for those choices, there is no pressure to make different ones the next time. Buchi Babu Sana made the same choices in Peddi, on a much bigger canvas, with a much bigger audience.

Why this matters beyond one film

Films do not exist in isolation, they circulate among the masses who celebrate them. They play in towns and cities across the country. They are watched by teenagers in single screens who are still forming their understanding of what is normal between men and women. They are watched by men who find their own attitudes reflected and validated on a forty foot screen. They are watched by women who are simply trying to enjoy a film and instead spend two hours being reminded of how they are seen.

The argument that this is just entertainment, that it is not meant to be taken seriously, does not hold. Entertainment is one of the primary ways a culture tells itself what is acceptable. When Telugu cinema repeatedly shows a man touching a woman without consent and frames it as romance, it is making a cultural statement. That calculation needs to change. And it will not change until audiences, critics, and the industry itself stop filing these things under the category of minor flaws in otherwise good films and start calling them what they are.

Peddi is, in several real ways, a good film. Infact, it deserved to be a better one. And the reason it is not is sitting right there on screen, if anyone cares to look.