Do not miss this one for the twinkling glances of Sharwa and Sai Pallavi, Vishal Chandrashekar’s music that is seamless with his score, Jay Kay’s cinematography for the way it breathes with the characters’ heartbeat. However leave the cinema hall soon after the first half and go home and treat yourself to a nice coffee.
Padi Padi Leche Manasu by Hanu Raghavapudi is a twists -obsessed narrative of a seeming romantic comedy that falls and rises, ironically suggestive of the title (literally meaning ‘a heart that falls and rises persistently’), to engage half-baked ideas of live-in relationships and eternal love with a dash of a natural calamity like earthquake and a mental illness like retrograde amnesia. What brews as a good coffee for a winter afternoon, ends up becoming a masala chai of ideas, bloated canvas, forced comic acts and lost emotional territories.
While the first half takes off with immense promise of an engaging narrative, with an exceptionally uplifting cinematography by Jay Kay using the colourful chaos of Calcutta — propping everything from narrow lanes, football, Victoria Memorial, Howrah bridge, pulled rickshaws to trams on the street –the lead pair go around painting the town red with their brewing chemistry. The colour palette and the camera movement achieved in this one will long be remembered.
Finally love happens. Conflicts crop. Misunderstandings arise.
Now in the second half, the emotional territory of the narrative conflict and the misunderstandings suddenly spill into the new characters introduced, sometimes aiming at humour and often becoming couriers of information between the two principal characters. Spreading across thinly, the narrative progressively suffers with a lost trajectory and never returns to the place it started off – the heartbeat of the lead pair – the heartbeat that was beautifully captured in the first half.
Misunderstandings suddenly wipe through tears to an abrupt climax ending in a marriage.
In what is popularly called as ‘kotha point’ (new point) in Telugu Film Criticism culture, the boy is challenged to woo and make the girl fall for him repeatedly as she forgets him – Padi Padi Leche Manasu for you there – the film could have been a modern classic of an invincibly eternal love story (if only).
PS: I think they cut a song too for which I was actually waiting – Urike Cheli Chilaka. I had been listening to it on loop. Sigh.
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