Nawab Cafe, bankrolled by Radha V Papudippu & Venkat R Papudippu, was released in theatres today. In this section, we are going to review the latest box office release.
Plot:
The story is set in Hyderabad where Ranganath (Rajeev Kanakala) runs a famous cafe known for its lip-smacking tea. Since the cafe comes with a legacy of over four centuries, he is emotionally attached to it. His young son, Raja (Shiva Kandukuri), doesn't want to be called a 'chai wala' and has lately started having dollar dreams. Meanwhile, a real estate tycoon named Kumar (Chaitanya Krishna, as Raja's cousin) wants the cafe signed off to him.
Post-Mortem:
Replace the cafe in this movie with farmland and the painfully outdated nature of the story becomes obvious. Nawab Cafe's clearly defined, manipulative antagonist is a proxy for the local village headman who uses his influence over gullible villagers to get his way in service of an evil industrialist. The sentimental stretches built around the cafe are reminiscent of the hackneyed emotionalism construed around paddy fields in routine rural dramas. The pacing is criminally slow. Whole scenes play out their conversations at 0.5X, making sure the audience is adequately clued into the dozen films that have inspired those boring situations.
Raja's life is full of setbacks and sudden, miraculous comebacks. He thinks he is done for if he doesn't clear his B.Tech backlogs this time. And he clears the exam by reproducing the story of Kalki 2898 AD. A major health crisis in the family gets dissolved just like that. He has a girlfriend who is like the premium tea powder he can afford only rarely. Otherwise, he is saddled with his cheap sidekick, played by Rajkumar Kasireddy, the metaphorical low-grade tea powder.
A track involves a rowdy money lender who looks like Narsing Yadav for all practical purposes. The hero owes a humongous sum to him: Rs 2 lakh. Unless the film is set in the 1980s, the amount is small change for a family that owns a popular, happening cafe right at one of the most commercially viable localities in Hyderabad. Director Pramod Harsha even conceives a primitively staged fight sequence around this totally annoying character. The hero, after causing damage to much of the cafe furniture in the sequence, reveals the shocking reason why he lost his cool: the rowdy dragged him by the collar of a shirt his beloved dad had gifted him. For those who have forgotten the detail, the cafe itself was so dear to the dear dad but the son had no issue causing damage to its legacy furniture.
There is a reason our review likens the heroine to a premium-grade tea brand. She is into potterymaking, something only premium girls in our gullies are into. She confesses love to Raja not once but twice, something only premium-range romantics are capable of. The villain, played by Chaitanya Krishna, is your franchise tea brand that claims to taste different but is generic. He comes up with wise sayings like this, "Don't chase money; make money chase you".
Rajeev Kanakala's character is somewhere between "Dies too late for his image" and "Dies too early for the film". For the amount of time he is seen, he threatens to die by jumping into a cup of tea to make sure his spirit gets trapped inside it.
The film clearly didn't deserve two of Prashanth R Vihari's songs: Sakhire and the item song.
Closing Remarks:
Despite its attempt to brew a soulful drama around a historic Hyderabadi landmark, Nawab Cafe is a bland, painfully slow, and flawed film. It trades genuine emotion for outdated "land-grabbing" cliches and "premium" romantic subplots that fail to land.
