Thartharaat (1989)

After the successful Dhumdhadaka (1985), this is the best known of the comedies featuring the Kothare-Berde duo considered to have revived the declining Marathi film industry in the 1980s. Here Kothare plays the fearless Inspector Mahesh Jadhav, on the track of the dreaded Taklu Haiwan gang, while Berde plays Lakshya, the bumbling son of newspaper editor Zunzharrao Ghorpade. In order to raise the circulation of Ghorpade’s newspaper, Lakshya publishes a fake news story that Haiwan has entered their village of Shrirangpur. When this is proved false, Lakshya finds himself in major trouble when Haiwan actually does arrive and nobody believes him. Nivedita Joshi plays a journalist and the inspector’s girlfriend, while Priya Arun plays the daughter of the local policeman (Shirke) and with Berde comprises the film’s second love interest. The film’s rapid editing, its surfeit of unevenly choreographed action and lack of control over camerawork betrays the film’s low budget and impoverished production context, a look it shares with many commercial productions from India’s smaller film industries.