Fidaa: Sai Pallavi all the way

After having seen heroines reduced to mere appendages in many a Telugu film of late, Fidaa offers a huge relief. Director Shekhar Kammula’s latest offering is strongly female-centric with sufficient screen space and characterisation provided to Sai Pallavi, the homely sensation of Malayalam movie ‘Premam’.

With the publicity clearly highlighting the genre of the film as a romantic family drama, one awaits a breezy entertainer. Of course, the infectious charm of the heroine lends a great pace to the first half in which she dominates even pushing the hero Varun Tej behind. Locating the proceedings in a Telangana small town (Banswada), Kammula makes all the characters speak the local dialect, a first of sorts in Telugu commercial cinema in recent times.

Juxtapositioning the narrative between America and Telangana, the film sees its lead role players fly in and out of the country till the final reels. Varun Tej, an aspiring neurosurgeon, based in USA, visits Pallavi’s hometown to finalise his elder one’s marriage and expectedly flips for the chirpy girl, a spunky, fun-loving, yet a family type woman in the end.

Of course, love blooms between the two as the girl understands that she has a good guy as her lover, yet desires that she stays back to take care of her father, torn between the affection of his two daughters. The impediment takes root when she misunderstands the hero and his actions and how all these unravel to complete the running time form the second half.

Speaking the Telangana lingo like a local, Pallavi lends a great watchability to the first half for sure. Kammula, for some strange reason, makes her character more whimsical and impulsive in the second and it is her mood swings which attempt to run it, which undoes all that the first part promises. In the end, the heroine turns out to be a weepy, affected type, surrendering to what her heart says which is not what she would have turned out to be only if the director had willed otherwise.

Varun Tej needs to be complimented for pairing with such a natural perfomer and his underplaying suits his role, which seems well within his comfort zone too. Still, even for the young things in love among the audience, the slow speed to the film as it plods along to a happy ending can be an endurance test for patience.

If Sekhar Kammula had wanted to convey a message that love triumphs over everything else, he may have managed to do so, yet one feels it could have done better with a little turbo charge of an engrossing story-teller.

Film Name : Fidaa

Cast : Varun Tej, Sai Pallavi, Sai Chand, Raja, Satyam Rajesh and Sharanya Pradeep
Direction : Sekar Kammula
Genre : Romance/ Drama
Likes : Telangana setting
Dislikes : Sluggish second half