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 "Gunday"

Gunday is not a great film. From time to time, it pretends as if it has something to say about Very Important Matters - the tragedies of war and divided nations, for instance, or the inefficacy of a system that alternately ignore and oppress the underprivileged, or immigrant identity and the stigma that accompanies it. It doesn’t really have much to say about these Very Important Matters, however. The narrative isn’t much interested in exploring its titular protagonists beyond their attractively bronzed surfaces. Bikram (Ranveer Singh) and Bala (Arjun Kapoor) are lifelong friends; they’ve turned to crime because the straight and narrow didn’t work for them; their quest for power owes itself to insecurities stemming from their identity as refugees from across the border; they’re insanely in love with the same woman. All of this is great material for an absorbing, memorable masala entertainer, the sort Gunday repeatedly pays homage to. Take Deewar, for instance, in which we find a protagonist whose trajectory is similar to the ones in Gunday. But Vijay’s descent into darkness carries much more weight, because his angst and his disillusionment are fully realized in the narrative, and the relationship with his estranged mother gives his arc great emotional urgency. Gunday pays lip service to the ideals of friendship and love, but none of these big emotions are anchored in anything beyond stray lines. The characters talk with great somberness about the injustice, about why they are the way they are, but we’d rather have seen them live through the circumstances that form them, motivate them, and wreck them. 

The most involving section of the film, in fact, is the prologue, in which we watch the young Bikram and Bala (played by two excellent child actors) survive truly harrowing situations. We watch them protect each other, and we believe in their love for each other. We feel for these plucky, mistreated kids. If the film were about these children, we'd be rooting for them throughout. But the film is about grown-up Bikram and Bala, and we don't really see grown-up Bikram and Bala suffer. I didn't know why I ought to be on their side even as they killed cops doing their jobs and threatened to set the city on fire. Montages of our heroes chilling with nuns and laughing with the poor didn't convince me. I needed a couple heavy-duty, expertly written scenes that would win me over to their crime-happy corner. Even more fatally for a film about an epic friendship, we don’t get any particularly moving moment that conveys fully the depth of these men's feelings toward each other. Both are very demonstrative, and have a good time together, and the two leads project a convincingly warm sort of bonhomie. I admit I bought that these guys were great pals, but the actors' chemistry sold me on their friendship, not the writing, which reaches for the kind of high drama that it doesn’t quite earn.

Despite all of the not insignificant problems I've listed above, Gunday is quite often during its considerable running time (a large chunk of which, I suppose, is taken up by slow-mo running) an enormously entertaining affair. It looks fantastic, for one. The film's aesthetic is one of unwavering, joyously gaudy exuberance. The on-location scenes have a vividness and tang to them. The song-and-dance numbers are colorful and energetic, though the Punjabi influence in much of the music is confounding. The period detailing isn't over-fussy, but you get the sense, in scenes set in the boys' office or living quarters, for instance, that some care has gone into creating a world that feels, if not painstakingly authentic, then at least something like the one we know from the films of the Seventies and Eighties. The film is never entirely, depressingly generic-looking, unlike a number of the recent (and much more expensive) superstar-driven actioners that I can think of. Even the big action set pieces (atop a train, amid the crowds at a Durga Puja, in a coalmine) are staged with the kind of flair that is entirely missing in so many of those bigger films, where wire-fu action beats are slapped together with some tired comedy. (There is some ridiculous action choreography here as well, but, overall, all the kicks and punches fly about with a good deal of zip.) The director, Ali Abbas Zafar, may not be skilled enough to ballast his second feature with the emotional heft that made the films he's inspired by so memorable. But he does seem to have a handle on the unashamedly pulpy pleasures of those entertainers.

Gunday is helped by the fact that the angry young men whose story it tells are played by, well, young men. When twenty-somethings play these slightly juvenile characters, with their brash thoughtlessness and their cocksure swagger and their love-at-first-sight nonsense, the proceedings are a sight more amusing, and less embarrassing, than when middle-aged actors play the same sort of part, squeezed into the same sort of clothes, making eyes and passes at the same women, and beating up the same passel of goons, but with much less energy and ease. Ranveer and Arjun are both great fun to watch when they are together, even they both have been directed, sometimes to comic effect, to growl and grimace through dialogue that doesn't quite merit that level of intensity. Arjun, I suspect, isn't a particularly good actor yet. He delivers many of his lines in a half-done way that makes you wonder if he's really thinking about what he's saying. But he acquits himself nicely when he gets to work those sleepy eyes and that charmingly manic grin. Ranveer is better. We already know he can pull off the goofy bits, but he brings to his character (character sketch, really, since neither role is written with much nuance or shading) both a quiet sense of decency and a degree of coiled tension. I was reminded, from time to time, by his performance (and his painted-on pants) of a young Vinod Khanna. 

Gunday also benefits from a tremendous antagonist in the form of Irrfan, who, in his cameo as a cop hot on the boys' trail, expectedly steals every scene he's in with his silky menace and his delicious way of making his lines both hilarious and potent with threat. He's clearly having a whale of a time, as is Priyanka Chopra, spectacular here in a series of gorgeous Dhakai sarees. Her performance here as the sort of woman who reduces men to roshmalai is evidence that the actor is immensely watchable when she drops the simpering, insubstantial ingenue act she unfortunately favors all too often, and aims for a more grown-up brand of sex appeal.

Gunday is by no means an essential entry into the modern masala canon, but it isn't a lazy cash-grab either. It's light on its feet and stylish and never ugly. Zafar cribs, with the proper degree of both respect and good humor, from sources he understands and has genuine affection for, instead of cynically and clumsily appropriating tropes and devices from South Indian films. Do I wish it did more with its resources and went further with its themes, that it delivered more completely on all of its narrative promise? I do. Did I still want to whistle admiringly a couple of times? Yep.