Director: Hanu Raghavapudi
Actors: Sai Pallavi, Sharwanand, Priyadarshi and Murali Sharma
Music Composer: Vishal Chandrasekhar
Sai Pallavi gives her audience two contrasting personalities at the cinema this week. As Araathu Anandhi, Sai Pallavi prepares to face off against the ‘naughtiest don’ in Maari 2. In Hanu Raghavapudi’s Padi Padi Leche Manasu, Sai Pallavi dives deep into the role of a medical student who falls headlong for a guy with commitment issues. And in this battle of the bros, sadly, Maari comes off looking better. At least he is willing to commit.
Hanu Raghavapudi’s Padi Padi Leche Manasu is gorgeously shot and composed. Rainy Kolkata plays a supporting role in this film as Vaishali and Surya, both sporting big hair, fall in and out of love.
Vishal Chandrasekhar weaves beautiful melodies for this romance. It sounds like a forever kind of love. Only it isn’t to be.
Suriya stalks Vaishali into a romance only to back out of it when it gets serious. Vaishali has her own issues to deal with. And somewhere in between this, Padi Padi Leche Manasu loses steam. Raghavapudi wants to show a complex relationship fraught with possibilities and brought to its knees by past trauma. It’s not fresh territory but certainly ambitious.
For this to succeed, Raghavapudi needs to know exactly where this movie ends. Most of the time after the interval, it kind of feels like he doesn’t . The plot becomes convoluted. The story picks up all the cinema tropes it valiantly fended off in the first half.
And just like Priyadarshi’s supportive BFF character in the film, the audience is dumbstruck at the way the film has changed tracks from a promising romance into yet another one of those ‘entertainers’ with a twist.
That’s not all bad, of course. But once Raghavapudi saddles Vaishali and Suriya with issues, flaws and traits that even actors Sharwanand and Sai Pallavi can’t make seem realistic, then the heart is quite lost.
Recommended
Padi Padi Leche Manasu proves that even the most effervescent of performances (by Sai Pallavi) cannot redeem a film and that stalking as a ‘fun film trope’ needs to be done away with as soon as possible.
*****
The Padi Padi Leche Manasu review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.