What Babu Gogineni’s diatribe against ‘Radhe Shyam’ tells us

‘Radhe Shyam’ has been a butt of ridicule. Mainly, its high-concept feature (or, should we say, confounding concept) has not got down well with most audiences. The film was conceived as a romantic classic. Director Radha Krishna Kumar got one thing right: He situated the plot in a bygone era. But what about the rest of the film?

Babu Gogineni, the activist and anti-superstition crusader, has been indulging in rambling attacks on ‘Radhe Shyam’. He has gone to the extent of saying that the dialogues of the film are a rip-off of WhatsApp forwards. His focus has been the film’s pro-Astrology, pro-Palmistry, pro-fatalism themes.

Gogineni is no torchbearer of truth, but his rants tell us something about today’s audiences. Most of them have not connected with the abstractness found in ‘Radhe Shyam’. When you don’t connect with a film, you will find all sorts of faults. Had a similar concept been narrated in a fresh, consistent, gripping manner by a Hollywood filmmaker, the same audience would not have questioned the concept. In ‘Radhe Shyam’, Krishnam Raju argues that palmistry is 99% science. But he actually means to say that it’s 100% science for 99% of humans. For the top 1% who are driven by a strong will, it’s 0% science. There is no clarity in how the story has been told.

Director Radha Krishna Kumar should have told ‘Radhe Shyam’ in a touching, hard-hitting, sometimes edgy manner. He made the Prabhas film look like an opulent universe. This has also been Ram Gopal Varma’s take. Babu Gogineni’s take is intellectual in character. But cinema is not about intellect. It’s about emotions.