‘Paagal’ movie review: A bizarre story of finding love

This Vishwak Sen and Nivetha Pethuraj film packs in troublesome ideas in the name of love

The hero is on a mission to find love. He seeks a woman who will love him as much as his mother did. When he is barely an adolescent, he walks into the nearest girls’ school with balloons and declares his love to every girl who crosses his path. By the time he’s an adult, he has professed his love to around 1600 women. And the makers of this film thought this is cute, or funny, or both. It’s one thing to narrate a story of a boy who loses his mother and yearns for love and another to turn it into a bizarre romcom drama. After a restrained portrayal of an investigation officer in HIT (2020), Vishwak Sen gets to play a flamboyant romantic hero named Prem who can crack jokes, dance and shed tears. But it’s tough to take his character or intentions seriously in a story that gets stranger as it progresses. When his quest for love reaches naught in Hyderabad, someone tells Prem that women in Vizag are more amenable — love in as generous as the ocean, or something along those lines. In the very next scene, Prem is in Vizag.