12 March,2022 07:02 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
Radhe Shyam
Basically, no love line (on your palm) = no love life (offline). And that's effective at the core of the conflict in this film. Say, what? Well, to understand that better, you must know the lead character Radhe's kaam (profession) in Radhe Shyam.
He's a palmist. That '90s folks (of my co-vintage) will remember from Cheiro's Palmistry - a popular paperback at railway stations and street vendors, that I don't see any more.
This film is the biggest investment since Cheiro to promote palmistry, that Radhe's mentor baba/guruji calls a "99 per cent science", which is also the title of his 200-odd page book, that he's been writing for 70 years! Why 99 per cent, asks the disappointed Radhe. "Because no science is 100 per cent accurate. Also, if everything was determined by destiny alone, the creator would not have blessed us with the power of thought."
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Fair point, but then Radhe's concerns are valid too. He gets everything right - down to the place and exact time of an event, reading lines on a person's hand, and rubbing his index finger on his forehead after. Consider India's richest man he consults once. Radhe tells him the guy won't make it in politics, and should concentrate on family business instead, which he will take over on November 20.
"No," says the rich man. I thought he'd say he has better things to do on that day. In fact he goes out golfing to beat Radhe's prediction. His papa pops it right then. So you see, as with other instances in this film, Radhe is no ordinary fortune teller.
He is "India ka Nostramadus." So globally famous, that John Lennon once took his autograph! Only that he's not in India anymore, because he had predicted Emergency, and was driven out of the country as a result!
Hence he's in Rome, where people's regular homes, like his own, bear ceilings the height of Sistine Chapel, and massive Corinthian columns, indoors. Yes, this is a period film, but set only in the late '70s, and performed on over-elaborate sets.
As with the palatial, Italian hospital, where the girl (Pooja Hegde), the hero fancies, works as a doctor at, among only desi co-workers.
And this one Indian patient, in particular, who loves to be admitted and actively demands surgery upon himself - complaining that his piss is darker than single malt, heart beats faster than an express train, and the gas in his stomach could blow up like a bomb. That guy, we're rightly told, suffers from nosophobia, which is the morbid/irrational fear of diseases.
The heroine, it turns out, also suffers from a disease. Although more real. What's it called? "Incurable, rare tumour." And it is, as her doctor uncle laconically explains, "incurable." Only that she fancies the idea of living on positive, palmistry prediction and prayers still, and that doc-chacha blasts her for it: "Don't make fun of my 40-year experience by keeping hope!" Face palm.
But let me not make this movie sound morbid. For it is anything but. It is a love story, through and through - a series of meet-cutes, and songs and ballroom dances.
Stuck slightly in the period it's set in - for what constitutes the early days of courting someone, as it were. Which is the guy following the girl around - and that all love starts from hate, after all. She's eventually impressed, because he travels over 300 kilometres in the rains to stalk her, if I may put it rather harshly.
At the centre of this romance is the heroine who could be dying, and the hero, who has no love line. The latter means what exactly, given his love-interest? He's up for âflirtationship', a new term I've discovered through this film, that's a lot shorter than âfriends with benefits' and sounds less creepy than a one night stand, surely!
Prabhas, the massive hero of Baahubali, captured through a string of low angle to shots to denote his big-screen stature, plays Radhe of Radhe Shyam. Basically the unprecedented success of Baahubali (2015, 17) - that he followed up with the senseless but scaled-up Saaho (2019) - has rendered it impossible for the national hero from Hyderabad to play a normal lover boy anymore.
A genre that's essentially about storms in a relationship, which must morph into an actual tsunami from nowhere, to turn this into a âdisaster film' as well - mean that here as another genre, of course.
What do you do in the comfort of a cinema, with your feet up, and eyes on the gigantic screen? Well, remember everything you can, and recount it to your friends, in as much detail you can. As I just did, so I don't have to watch it again.
