Radhika Apte’s unnamed film has one familiar problem

Radhika Apte did not name the Telugu film. She said she once played a woman who had to marry her “mama”, romance a much older actor, die midway through the story and be thrown over his shoulder during an action sequence. “That was the most challenging film; everything about it I hated,” she said in a Zoom conversation linked to the promotion of Akka, according to reports.

She also called the setting “very patriarchal”. Reports and circulating posts inferred that she was referring to Boyapati Srinu’s 2014 film Legend, in which Apte appeared with Nandamuri Balakrishna. That identification remains an inference: Apte did not name either the film or the actor. The reported kinship detail also does not neatly match available descriptions of her character, so certainty would be doing more acting than the film industry usually requires.

The reaction, however, was familiar. Sections of Balakrishna’s online fan base criticised Apte for signing the film, objecting to its story or working with him again in Lion in 2015. The question was why she accepted the role if she disliked it. That is a useful question about contracts, perhaps. It is not a rebuttal to her experience of the material.

More importantly, the reaction moved attention away from the film’s construction of its female character: a younger woman placed beside an older male star, then removed through death while the hero continues with the action. In star-driven cinema, criticism of the vehicle is often treated as disloyalty to the star. The woman can die on schedule; the star must remain beyond review.

That is the real patriarchal arrangement here. Apte’s remarks may still need clarification, especially about which film she meant. The reflex to defend the hero does not.