I did it! A midweek movie! At a theater that doesn’t usually show Indian movies, and was still half full on a Thursday. So, woo-hoo Vijay Devaronda!!!! His career is growing by leaps and bounds.

Do you like romances? Do you like swoony moments and tormented heroes and lovable average heroines? Then this is the movie for you! On the other hand, if you like tightly crafted logical plots, this is NOT the movie for you. Go away and watch some other movie and leave us illogical romance lovers alone.

Vijay is wonderful, and the role is clearly written for him. It’s a bit of an Arjun Reddy redux. Less raw and brilliant, more just hitting the same notes of sweet unexpected love, followed by torment, followed by personal growth. The heroine was surprisingly charming, both her performance and how her character was written and presented. I hadn’t seen Rashmika Mandanna in anything else, but that is my own fault. She was in Geetha Govindam with Vijay just last year, and she was in the Kannada hit Kirik Party, and she was in Devadas with Nagarjuna and Nani. All movies that I intended to getting around to watching someday, and have not. Her performance in this film, and her chemistry with Vijay, was a delightful surprise to me only because of my willful ignorance of her previous work. On the other hand, surprises are nice! I went in knowing Vijay was the hero, but not even sure who the heroine character was until long after her introduction, so their romance was as much a surprise to me as to the characters.

This is a first time director movie, and it’s not bad for a first time director. As I said, the plot is a bit rocky, I kept itching to rewrite it. But the visuals are great, and the individual scenes are lovely, and the characters and performances that develop are a tribute to the skill of a director willing to take his time and bring out the best. Bharat Kanna’s next film could be perfected and wonderful, or he could sink into obscurity. But I’m gonna be optimistic! There are the seeds of some really wonderful things in this movie that could grow and grow over a few more films.

This is kind of an interesting film in that it has pretenses to be an Arjun Reddy, but it is really far more of a Sekhar Kammula film. A slow story that builds in multiple characters, a romance with a heroine who has more problems and strength inside than the hero, and a larger message of good people doing good things and being rewarded. Maybe that is why the plot ended up so confused? It was trying to serve two masters, the sweet stable sensitive Telugu film tradition and also the new age rough and tumble realistic Telugu hero.

But none of that relates to the main reason for this review, should you watch it? As a romance, it has all the best ingredients. Multiple delicious romantic moments, great songs, great central characters with a believable love story. As a movie with a message (which it has pretensions to be), it doesn’t work very well. As a movie about Communism, it completely loses the thread halfway through. As a movie about feminism…well, that’s interesting. It fails in the message it intends to give, but it succeeds in the feminist message that all great romances have, a strong interesting individual who happens to be a woman falling in love with another strong interesting individual who happens to be a man.