On "Bajirao Mastani"

Princess Mastani, the eponymous heroine of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's latest, is extraordinary not just because she is beautiful (as played by Deepika Padukone, she looks like she might dissolve into sunlight and mist at any moment) or because she is a skilled warrior. Mastani is also fantastically cussed, a creature of shockingly little reason or sense. A brief flirtation with a Maratha general impels her to abandon her home and land up at his. She remains there in the face of insult and injury, degradation and ostracization, because she must have her Bajirao. And once she has him, Mastani makes him the locus of her existence, waiting for him, making love to him, bearing offspring for him, and eventually losing her child and her life for him. Padukone doesn't even blink when she looks at Singh; her splendid eyes are astar and a little deranged.

Bhansali has always romanticized (and eroticized) extreme submission. But the clever, brave, literate Mastani's self-effacement in the name of love is a dizzying new level in the sadomasochistic love games that often form the crux of his films. She's the Glenn Close character from Fatal Attraction, except Bhansali exalts her for her magnificent obsession instead of making her an object of derision. 

If you're the sort who expects characters in fiction and art to act in rational, constructive ways that best serve their own interests, Bajirao Mastani, Bhansali's retelling of an 18th-century noblewoman's love affair with an already married warrior-statesman, will annoy you as much as Bhansali's previous romantic dramas did. 

The principal characters in Bhansali's cinematic universe are all superego and id, sex drive and death drive, high passion and high dudgeon, and they, like their creator, do little by half-measures. I wrote in an earlier piece that a SLB love story, at least Devdas onward, is generally "a horror film of sorts. Love is both god and monster; and since there is no fleeing from it, the infuriating, fascinating victims in Bhansali's cavernous yet claustrophobic world run toward it, bloodied and crazed." 

Romantic love as sublime torture, as the thorn in your side (or, if we're being referential, in your foot) that you leave there till you are near-dead and orgasmic with the poison in your system, is not an easy or even pleasant notion to buy into, but Bhansali realizes this notion with such Quixotic mania in every aspect of his movies that I, for one, invariably find myself impressed, if not always moved. He is a true visionary, a filmmaker whose ambition is matched by an ability to hard-sell his worldview (perverse as it may seem to many) through the almost wracking beauty of his visuals and music and the dogged, unflagging thrust of his narrative toward the rousingly tragic. 

Bhansali's abiding interest has been viraha, the separation of lovers that is heavy with pain and an almost spiritual sort of longing. I was a little taken aback when I thought back on his oeuvre and realized that, despite the reputation his films have for the chemistry between their main leads, the lovers of his films spend very little time in each other's company. Kept apart by circumstances and wounded pride and intransigent families, they are, after the initial courtship, mostly shown pining for one another. The separation of the titular couple, less organic here than in Bhansali's other films (since she marries him and lives right across the hall, so to speak) might have become Bajirao Mastani's biggest downfall were it not for its lead actors. Singh and Padukone make so much heat and light out of the surprisingly meager screen-time they have together (and very little by way of interesting storytelling about the two of them as a unit post-marriage) that it is on the strength of their chemistry alone that the film holds together.  

Padukone is, in general, tremendous in the film, playing Mastani with an appealingly wanton quality and using those magnificent eyebrows and long, expressive hands to great effect in each of her magnificent dance numbers. It's a pity, then, that her Urdu is rather ragged and uninflected, especially given how solid her co-star's accent work is, alongside the rest of what he manages to accomplish in his superstar-making turn here.

I said a silent prayer of gratitude for Singh while watching the film. Thank heavens Bhansali wasn't able to make this film earlier with any of the other male stars he'd intended to cast. Singh is virile and beautiful as Bajirao, who is perhaps the most interesting male protagonist Bhansali has ever written. (The filmmaker's women are almost always the most compelling figures in his work; the men are generally immature, unworthy idiots or curmudgeonly saints.) Singh brings so much swagger to his deeply committed performance and is so ferociously, terrifyingly alive that the film almost seems like it's in 3-D when he's onscreen. His Bajirao is so many things — noble, funny, sexy, imperious, hotheaded, scheming, and eventually weary and broken — and the actor hits all of those notes without showing any sign of strain. You understand why the two women in his life are so hopelessly besotted with him. 

The second of those two women, Priyanka Chopra's Kashibai, is the film's most sympathetic character. Singh and Chopra's scenes with one another are full of warmth and humor in a way that his with Padukone just aren't. Chopra, in what is perhaps her best performance to date, brings reserves of dignity, humor, and warmth to Kashi and just about walks away with the film;  the wise, sweet Kashibai follows in the tradition of Madhuri Dixit's Chandramukhi (Devdas) and Rani Mukerji's Gulabji (Saawariya) as the character whom, despite her third-wheel status, the audience feels most for (and would probably like best in real life). 

Chopra gets the film's two most emotionally charged scenes — the first, where she finally reveals to Bajirao her anguish at having been abandoned; and the second, in which she visits her rival and encourages her to stay unwavering in the face of vitriolic intolerance. Chopra's Kashi is a paragon of traditional wifely virtue, but she is refreshingly uncompromising in her own way. She refuses to abnegate her self-respect by being content with her husband's second-best love. She refuses, also, to be unjust to the other woman; her resentment is reserved for the man who's made the decision to bring this other woman home.  

Chopra also gets the film's sexiest moment; she watches Singh bathe with unconcealed lust and is subsequently carried off to bed by him. Singh's romance with Padukone is chaste by comparison; the closest they get to physical intimacy is when he presses a dagger (no innuendo intended) into her back and when he helps deliver their baby. This bit is touching and funny, and not just because the baby is clearly fake.

Bajirao Mastani is Bhansali's first film based on historical events (if one discounts Black, which took significant inspiration from the Helen Keller story). Bhansali remains engaged primarily with the personal here, but he also concerns himself with the political in a way that he never did in his previous films. The film begins with Bajirao's declaration that he intends, by taking down the Muslim Mughals, to re-establish a Hindu empire in India. But he goes on to marry a Muslim woman and raise a Muslim son. The perceived corruption of the bloodline is what drives his mother, his brother, and the ruling religious order of his fiefdom to attack Mastani again and again. (All this maltreatment of Mastani gets a little repetitious, eventually; I'd rather have done away with it, and Singh's victory dance number, in favor of more of the lead pair together.) I was worried at the outset that Bajirao Mastani would take a troublingly of-the-moment Hindu supremacist view of the famed warrior's story, but it ends up being a fairly explicit call for inter-religious tolerance and harmony. As admirable as this message may be, it also feels facile, given that Bajirao's change of heart (which is what it really feels like, despite his subsequent claim to his mother that he was always fighting the Mughals, never the Muslims) isn't explored with any sort of nuance. And what of his massive ambition to conquer the entire nation? Bhansali doesn't quite know how to navigate Bajirao's aspirations as a statesman with the same level of engagement that he has with the character's domestic life. 

He does a better job of establishing Bajirao as a fearsome warrior, though, and Singh makes for a convincing and kinetic action star. Bhansali's aesthetic choices in the battle scenes are inspired by a couple unexpected sources: Wuxia films and graphic novels. (The thrilling opening credits make the latter inspiration explicit.) Despite these interesting influences, these scenes are not always visually successful. I wish Bhansali had relied less on CGI and more on practical effects and an impressionistic filming style, where cunningly chosen detail, rather than slightly incoherent editing and computer-generated trickery in unkind close shots, could have given us a sense of the action. 

Otherwise, however, this is an intimidatingly gorgeous film. Bhansali's visuals are, contrary to popular opinion, not pretty just for the heck of it. He gives the audience much to look at, but not out of a desire to pander. The glorious-looking worlds of his films, where each color and element is full and vigorous, are the most effective setting for the vivid, heightened emotional states of his characters. The compositional symmetry of his scenes and set pieces makes for the sort of backdrop against which the unrelenting forces of chaos set in motion to thwart his protagonists stand out in especially startling relief. 

Throughout Bajirao Mastani, I was almost afraid to blink for fear of missing some new wonder, some gleaming beauty. I almost laughed out of sheer disbelief during Deewani Mastani, a musical sequence of absurd, discombobulating beauty. (Mastani dances in a brazen whirl of gold in this number, but I was struck by how she, after her move to Pune, is almost always situated in enormous, ruin-like, shadowy rooms, a woman in the middle of hostile seas.) Bajirao Mastani's symphonic visual language is rich with diverse influences (Mughal tapestries, the Ajanta cave murals, Raja Ravi Verma paintings), but the resulting look is singular, purposeful, and memorable.

Ultimately, Bhansali and his team are trying to give us an experience, bold and large and go-for-broke, in Bajirao Mastani. The film has its faults, but halfheartedness or laziness are not among them.This is a film that is naked in its desire to stir and impress, and, to its credit, it often succeeds. Bajirao Mastani, exhausting as it can be, is a forceful, exhilarating work.

On "Tamasha"

Tamasha, Imtiaz Ali's latest film, is fortified with all the strengths the director's movies usually possess and weakened by a number of the same flaws. And just like most of his work, it is wonderful and frustrating. 

Here, too, is a man (Ved Vardhan Sahni, played by Ranbir Kapoor) who is broken and can only be fixed by the loving ministrations of a woman (Deepika Padukone's Tara Maheshwari) he puts through the wringer. Here, too, are the existential dilemmas of well-off folks who need to find themselves through tourism and romantic adventure in verdant, picturesque lands, far away from the quotidian distractions of work, family, and real life. Here, once again, are mental health issues, not fully understood or explicated,  and eventually  fixed rather conveniently, as they invariably are in his happy-ending films (Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal before this one), by requited romantic love and the successes that love inspires in the world of his films.

But Tamasha, like the rest of the films in Ali's oeuvre, mines an almost spiritual sort of wonder from the notion that romantic love warms the great, cold gloom of life into something meaningful and transcendent. Ali has a way with making love's most ineffable experiences visible in his films. He insinuates himself into the companionable silences of kindred spirits, captures the barely contained heat that rises off lovers, simulates with an astonishing keenness of eye the childlike joyousness, the sun-dappled idyll of falling in love and the sad, clanging hideousness of trying to fall out of it. 

I found myself reacting intensely to Tamasha's conception of love as a force of freedom and for good. The film's lovers, in its halcyon Corsica portion, form a jolly, candid friendship right away. They feel emancipated by each other to find in themselves the sweet, unchecked vigor of childhood and also grow toward better, less phony versions of themselves. They both challenge and comfort each other. Well, Ved is challenged and comforted by Tara; the narrative shortchanges her and focuses on him. She is rounded out not by Ali's screenplay but by Padukone's generous performance. As she has been in all of her recent work, she is the cynosure of every scene she's in, bringing to the bracing, unembarrassed Tara a shimmering transparency.

Ali's vision has, in spite of its steadfast faith in the redemptive enchantment of love, darkened with each film, and he lets the shadows swallow his lead players whole before they find their happy ending in Tamasha. They lose hold on their dignity, their sense of self, even their sanity before they are allowed to find their way back to each other. And Kapoor and Padukone together are so vivid, so easy that I was convinced that their characters ought to be together, once he figures his shit out, of course. Some may, with good reason, find her acceptance of him at the end  too facile, even masochistic, but I bought it. Padukone turns into a creature of light and air when she's around the version of Ved that isn't a boring little office drone. (Ranbir, with his French beard, bad posture, and flattened out speech, plays this tedious, unctuous, flavorless man, the one who the girl would dump for the leading man in other love stories, with as much care as he does the flamboyant pixie that is, according to the film and Tara, Ved's true self.) When the two look at each other, you believe they're seeing each other.

But before he makes their match, Ali constructs an idealist's argument for the the value of a fully examined life. Tamasha is a lyric battle-cry against anodyne conformity. Ali calls, like Rajkumar Hirani (in 3 Idiots) and Zoya Akhtar (in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dil Dhadakne Do) before him, for the liberation of the (generally straight, cismale) self from conformity through joyous art-making, lovemaking, and travel. But he makes his case with wit and audacity, creating a kind of arch collage of image and sound for his film. He directs his actors to play straight, and stages stretches of the film with casual naturalism. But he also calls attention to the artifice of film as a medium of storytelling with playful, showy touches.  He marks "chapters" with French pulp illustration-style title cards that reference pulp Bollywood movies. He slices up the narrative often so the audience is kept just a smidge disoriented by the back and forth of the non-linear narrative. He spins a haze of golden, wine-soaked glamor all over the couple's romp in Corsica, which unspools with a delightfully relaxed unpredictability, and then shoots the Delhi portions like a thriller, mostly at night (the daylight scenes are mostly of Ved going through the motions, again and again, at home and work; if one were to name an Instagram filter inspired by the tone of these parts, it'd be called "Antiseptic"), with silences that are always on the threshold of ominous. He has the characters from the tales little Ved likes to listen to (in a flashback marked "flashback") haunt the streets of Shimla in costumes clearly realized in the imagination of a child. (Laxman is wearing a school-uniform sweater under his bow.) 

Ali also makes cunning, unexpected use of AR Rahman's score; troupes of balladeers in Punjab sing to the audience as Tara struggles to recover from her love affair in Kolkata. An autorickshaw driver is seen, in his memory, singing a lusty folk number, while he reminisces about his past glory in the presence of a lost Ved at a roadside dhaba. The sad, sweet Agar Tum Saath Ho plays as Ved leaves Tara, his walk slowed to the herky-jerky movement of an eight-bit video game. All this showy technique doesn't bug, however, since this is, after all, a film about finding new ways to tell old stories and choosing new stories to tell about oneself. 

Tamasha and its protagonists are idiosyncratic enough, its play of wide-eyed hopefulness and quiet despair compelling enough, that the film develops an appealing strangeness that overcame, for the most part, my instinctual desire to roll my eyes at its earnest insistence on individualism in a story about pretty, privileged, able-bodied people in a society that sets very few challenges in the way of their path to self-actualization. Tamasha's weirdness, and the radiant conviction of its female lead, save it from smugness.

On "Bombay Velvet"

Bombay Velvet is an ambitious film. Anurag Kashyap's assiduously crafted period piece wants to be an alternate history of Mumbai's rise after the fall of the British Raj. To this end, Kashyap shows us archival footage of Bombay and a map of the city as its overlords envisioned it at the time. He has characters deliver, in the form of dialogue, contextual information about land reclamation and political chicanery.  In a postscript, he updates us on the present status of the city and tells us what came of the actual real estate developments that the fictional characters in the film concern themselves with. An enormous set and impressive visual effects are used to gorgeously evoke a vision of Bombay in the fifties and sixties that is so richly and specifically detailed that it reads as authentic. Kashyap is intent on making a magnum opus.

The problem with the film is that its grand aspirations are tacked on to a story that is pure pulp, and not particularly inspired pulp at that. The plot is focused on an immoral goon who is, like the film constructed around him, frighteningly ambitious. It is the usual rags-to-riches-to-revenge stuff that is rife with all sorts of ramshackle coincidences and improbable developments. And it is not sound enough scaffolding for the Serious Filmmaking that Kashyap is going for in his retelling of the initial chapters in Mumbai's post-Independence history. The masala-noir contrivances don't really hold up under the kind of scrutiny that a film that actually wants to say something meaningful about history would generally be subjected to. On the other hand, the filmmaking is often slightly bloodless, and that approach might be in line with the high-minded tangents Kashyap wants to make but is at odds with the movie's larger-than-life, filmi aspects. 

Furthermore, the protagonists aren't particularly compelling. Johnny Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor) wants to be a big-shot because he started out with nothing. But he is not interesting, uniquely intelligent, or even charming. He just wants more money and more power. He is arrogant, evil-tempered, and homicidal. He doesn't have a heart of gold or any scruples to speak of. He's basically the villain from a standard-issue Bollywood movie, except he gets a backstory. Oh, and he likes this girl. Rosie Noronha (Anushka Sharma) has killed her abuser and run away from Portugese-occupied Goa. She takes risqué pictures to jumpstart her career as a singer and finds herself a sugar daddy. On this man's command, she enters Balraj's life to get something out of him (negatives for an incriminating picture of a politician – the business surrounding these negatives is uninteresting and unconvincing throughout) but ends up falling in love with him. All of this ought to make for a fascinating character, but Rosie is mostly passive and sad. When the film showed us Rosie's childhood right after it showed us Balraj's, I figured that it would really be about both of them. But Rosie is just The Girl. I wish we'd seen her write her own music or rise through the ranks at Bombay Velvet, the club Balraj runs. (I suspect, based on the presence of Raveena Tandon, who gives the film a jolt of much-needed sex appeal in her all-too-brief appearances, that a subplot about Rosie supplanting an established singer at the club was left on the editing table. I feel like too much has been taken out of the film in general; as a result, it's slightly incoherent.) 

Balraj and Rosie's love is supposed to motivate much of the film's action. Balraj wants to make it big so he can win Rosie, for one. But Kashyap, once again misjudging what is interesting about his film, does not really show us how the two actually fall in love. Also, the leads are not the sort of performers who can enliven a thin or unsympathetic part by sheer force of charisma. Madhuri Dixit and Amitabh Bachchan, to name the most notable examples, routinely employed megawatt star power to turn wan outlines of an archetype into characters worth rooting for. Kapoor and Sharma are both excellent actors, but they are not the sort of actors who can deliver a memorable performance when the character is basic-ish on paper.They both do the best they can, and Sharma is spectacularly moving in the film's showpiece number, Dhadaam Dhadaam (Amit Trivedi's score, by the way, is genius throughout), but old-fashioned magnetism is not either star's strong suit. I kept fantasy-casting the film as I was watching it, and I wondered what Ranveer Singh, with his manic, slightly sleazy energy, and Huma Qureshi, with her volcanic sexual charisma, would have done with these roles. 

The only intriguing prominent character in the film is Kaizad Khambatta, the silken, scheming power player who backs Balraj's rise and authors his fall. Karan Johar, in his first major film role, gives us a sense of the unconventional character's dimensions and desires in a surprisingly sexy performance; the screen just about thrums with menace when he appears. Khambatta merely alludes to his origin story (he is the scion of a major publishing family that had fallen on hard times and has had to rebuild the newspaper practically from scratch), but Johar finds a way to work the weight of the neurosis resulting from his unpleasant history as well as the heat of his lust for Balraj into his scenes. Khambatta is also the only character in whom Kashyap successfully reconciles the film's interest in the backroom politics that created modern-day Mumbai and its negotiation of more genre-y conventions.

I want to be clear that I did not find Bombay Velvet worthless or tiresome. It looks and sounds stunning. It is intelligent in its craftsmanship and never boring. But I can't stop thinking about what the film could have been. For one, I rather wish Kashyap had set the film more fully at the titular club. I can imagine a Bombay Velvet that might have been about the schemers and climbers at each table, about the backstage rivalries and the shady dealings, and about the love between the ambitious manager of the club and its ingenue singer. It might have been more of an ensemble film, giving us glimpses of a variety of colorful characters instead of a conventional pair of lovers. It would have allowed for more tightly focused, satisfying storytelling and for a more organic-seeming, less awkward exploration of the city's culture and ethos at that time. But that might not be the film Kashyap wanted to make. As it stands, Bombay Velvet is admirable for its chutzpah, but it is not quite the Great Film it clearly aspires to be. (I'm very curious about what an extended cut would look like, though.)

On "Dolly Ki Doli"

(Spoilers ahead!)

Dolly Ki Doli could have been a terrific little film if the plotting were not so frustratingly facile. The idea of a young woman tricking men into marrying her and then making off with their money is rich with potential for both humor and intrigue, but the narrative rushes from one plot point to the next with such little concern for internal logic that the film starts feeling a little limp. Characters turn up at places, discover crucial information, and get out of trouble without the audience ever finding out how they did it. I'm perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief if the film asks for it, but this one isn't aiming for farce. The tone is, if not realistic, then at least fairly low-key. Thus the slapped-together, ramshackle plot feels egregious.

One of the film's pleasures is that it runs a brisk hundred minutes, and I don't think it should have been longer. But the makers ought to have lopped off a few slow-mo walks and wedding-montage bits and showed us in greater depth how Dolly and her gang make their cons work again and again without getting caught. There's a bit where someone tries to take a picture of Dolly on her phone but she hides her face, but how have they managed to stop people from taking smartphone pictures before this? Also, the film goes to great lengths to show us that Dolly avoids all physical intimacy with her grooms, not only making excuses to forego consummation but managing to convince them they shouldn't even touch her on the wedding night. I mean, your husband is probably going to want to at least make out on your wedding night even if you're on your period.

The film is not without its joys, though. Some of the funny bits are actually pretty, well, funny. Archana Puran Singh is especially hilarious as a domineering matriarch, and her caftans are amazing. (The costuming is pretty great throughout, and gives you an instant sense of who the characters are or who they're pretending to be.) The cast is stacked with wonderful character actors, who do a great deal with small, lightly outlined parts. The leads are all good (with the exception of Pulkit Samrat, who has very nice skin but whose acting is weak Salman pastiche). Rajkummar Rao sells the smarm and the heartache equally well; there are few young leading men working in Hindi films right now who can fashion such clever, subtle performances out of under-written roles. Sonam Kapoor still does her best acting in her quiet moments, since her voice isn't her strongest asset. (She is lovely in the beautiful flashback number, Mere Naina Kafir.) But she brings a sense of humor to her coy girl-next-door act as bride-Dolly, and gives "real" Dolly a casual steeliness that I was into.

I also appreciated Dolly as a character. Dolly is amoral, but she isn't weak or foolish. A strong female protagonist in a Bollywood comedy is rare enough that Dolly's character felt fairly radical to me. The narrative, for all its flaws, never neuters her or robs her of her agency, even when you are certain that it will. She gets a tragic backstory, but she states clearly that her past doesn't define her or explain her. I'm not particularly turned on by criminals and antiheroes in fiction or films, but there's a unapologetic patriarchy-smashing quality to Dolly's escapades that feels unusual and subversive. I wish the film built around her had been as interesting as Dolly herself, but I'll take what I can get, which, in the case of Dolly Ki Doli, is a moderately enjoyable diversion.