Padi Padi Leche Manasu

Padi Padi Leche Manasu Story: It's a Telugu-speaking community in Kolkata where a rebellious youngster Surya falls for a medical student Vaishali. The love story isn't as simple as it appears to be. Surya doesn't let Vaishali realise his true identity. There's an obvious conflict, there's a natural disaster and a possible medical disorder too. How do these threads come together? Well, that's the film for you in a nutshell.

Padi Padi Leche Manasu Review: The beauty and the curse of love stories is that they are identifiable and predictable at the same time. Love stories strike a chord when storytellers make the tale feel relevant for the times. Unfortunately director Hanu Raghavapudi isn't one among them. He takes a spectator into a fantasy world of sorts, of the journey of two opposites.

The backdrop is a classic one, it's a fit-for-nothing guy Surya and the girl Vaishali's a reasonably smart medical student. This is Kolkata in its monsoons and love is about to blossom. Surya masks his identity to make Vaishali fall for him. There's a mythological connection about how Rukmini admires Lord Krishna without knowing the latter in person. The director takes this cue to treat this like an epic romance but loses sight of logic soon, so much that the romance begins to feel outlandish. You nearly fall for the great visuals but this isn't the story that should have been mounted on this grand canvas.

This is another film where stalking is glorified, the guy chases and follows the girl so much that the latter is left without an option but to love him. After this problematic trope, the director takes the story to Nepal and builds a conflict in the relationship through an earthquake. That indeed seems poetic for an idea, but in terms of execution, Padi Padi Leche Manasu falls flat. An entire thread about retrograde amnesia is stuffed into the choppy narrative soon. The average-fare is further let down by the jerky narration in the second hour.

The film doesn't have well-written characters beyond the lead protagonists and really feels the absence of a strong sub-plot. Even with Sharwanand, the film wouldn't have changed much if he wasn't a footballer. The character of his father Vivek, when the latter seeks a divorce from his wife merely for taking his career forward, doesn't appear convincing at all. The director saves a quintessential twist for the last 30 minutes while the damage is already done.

Despite all these crests and troughs in the story, if you end up investing in the emotions of the lead characters, it's because of Sharwanand and Sai Pallavi's supreme performances. They make for a terrific pair on-screen and complement each other very well in terms of histrionics. The only thing they needed was a better script than Padi Padi Leche Manasu. It's a similar case with the cinematographer Jay Kay and composer Vishal Chandrasekhar who put heart and soul into the film, albeit for an insipid story. Sunil, as a comedian, really needs to think twice about his choice of roles. While Hanu Raghavapudi should've made the story more believable. It's a film that the cast and crew would ideally want to erase from their memory sooner or later, like the retrograde amnesia patient in the film.