RAM-LEELA BOX OFFICE AND REVIEW THREAD 3 (202 cr WorldWide Gross) - Page 81

Is Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Ram-Leela a return to form? I suppose the answer to that question depends on what you've thought of his oeuvre. Devdas is perhaps his most divisive work; many have leveled charges of misogyny, mistreatment of the source material, and overwhelming visual and dramatic excess against the film. I, for one, think Devdas is one of the great films of Hindi cinema - almost disturbingly gorgeous, and fully, consistently successful in realizing the darkly lunatic vision of its creator. In Devdas, the characters hurtle toward the doom that their obsessive loves have ensured for them with an almost blissful single-mindedness. The film is ripe with the kind of foreshadowing that is usually reserved for horror narratives. And indeed, Devdas is 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.

Khamoshi and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Bhansali's first two films, are generally beloved, and both are interesting movies. I suppose people also enjoy these films more because they contain likable characters who behave sensibly and anchor the film to some sort of rational ground with their general sanity. But Bhansali wasn't yet fully in control of his themes or his visual grammar (the latter issue might have to do with smaller budgets) when he made these films, and the shakiness is evident (and, to many viewers, much more endearing than the obsessive directorial control in his later films). Black, which followed Devdas, is an operatic retelling of the Helen Keller story, reworked as a romance, presented with a deeply unironic, Capra-esque reverence for the triumph of the human spririt, and buoyed by enormous, deeply moving lead performances by Rani Mukerji and Amitabh Bachchan. After the failure of Saawariya (a film I didn't quite love, but admired for its fully committed weirdness), much-derided for its unrelenting, literal blueness and its entirely artificial dark-fairytale setting, Bhansali decided to go high-minded again, except the result, Guzaarish, was a well-intentioned, lovely-looking, mush-heavy mess, with courtroom scenes of unbelievable clunkiness and an embarrassingly limp subplot regarding intrigue in the world of professional sorcery. Bhansali is ultimately an artist in thrall to l'amour fou, and if he'd focused his narrative lens on the quietly tragic love story of its lead pair (an enjoyable Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai, in what is her perhaps her greatest performance to date), he'd have made a much more satisfying movie.

Ram-Leela is certainly satisfying. It's the most fun I've had at the movies all year, and I'd go as far as to say that it's the most purely fun film Bhansali's ever made. The film is an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, with its sprawling dynasties, its mythic overtones, and its delightfully purple prose (the language is almost always full of delights in a Bhansali film, the lines fashioned with both wit and lyricism.) It is also a gleefully frank, uproariously bawdy exploration of sexual attraction. There is such boundless joy in Ram and Leela's undisguised lust for each other, their inability to keep their eyes or hands off each other, that one can't help but be swept along in the thrilling currents of their desire. There is much to love here. Just like the yards of fiery red chillies left out to dry all over the roofs and courtyards of the Gujarati township the film is set in, Ram-Leela crackles with color and flavor. Bhansali's films usually have a lapidary quality; everything is precisely where the director wants it to be, and even the elements stream into his cinematic worlds in pre-determined patterns. Ram-Leela has that preciseness in its aesthetic, but it's also looser, more naturalistic than most of Bhansali's films, and that looseness feels just right in a movie where violence and chaos, and not just the emotional sort, can break out at any moment.

Ram-Leela is based on Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare, with his mix of high poetry and lowbrow humor, his beautiful heroines and scheming villains, is perfectly suited to Bhansali's filmic sensibilities. While some critics have complained that too many new plot twists have resulted in a convoluted second half, I thought that these inventions both kept this very familiar tale relatively unpredictable and gave larger, more engaging context to the central love story. The protagonists' growing, unhappy awareness that their passion is not independent of the world they inhabit is what informs Bhansali's take on the source material.

Consider, for instance, the rewriting of the Capulet parents. Dhankor Baa (Supriya Pathak) is a character of such magnificent ferocity that she alone is enough to distinguish this version of the play from the countless others. But this character also allows Leela, our desi Juliet, to be more than just a longing ingenue. As the daughter of the area's most powerful woman, she is the heir to her mother's empire, which leads to the lovers facing off, in the film's most tense, moving scene, as not only the offspring of warring families but as the rival heads of those families. In this retelling, the protagonists have more to consider, eventually, than the affairs of their own heart, and these raised stakes worked very well for me.

The film's chief joy, though, is its lead pair. Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone are sweet and teasing and hilarious and relaxed and almost impossibly sexy together. Theirs is the sort of intimacy that makes you feel like you ought to perhaps look away, because it's so charged (especially in the delicious Ang Laga De number), but you can't, of course, because they're having such a grand time with each other. Deepika is instantly iconic as Leela. She is lovely to look at, but she isn't delicately ethereal like the heroines of Bhansali's other notable love stories. Her presence is earth and fire; visually, she's a little more Smita Patil in Mirch Masala (another film full of scorching sunlight and red chillies everywhere) than Aishwarya Rai in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. Her performance is so rich with emotion and mood, her big, wet eyes so melodious with expression, that I can confidently say that we have an engaging, even surprising, actor in Deepika Padukone, one who has much more to her than one could have imagined. And she is at ease here as she's never been, which might have something to do with her male lead. Ranveer has a genius for onscreen authenticity. Uninhibited in the most wonderfully genial way, he finds the exact chord of mania that Bhansali needs of his men, and makes actorly music out of the madness. Ranveer is that rare leading man, one with true range and the physical gifts that allow full expression to that range. As Ram, he is lecherous, clownish, feral, elated, broken-hearted, and philosophical, sometimes all at once. It is a great, generous performance.

Ram-Leela didn't leave me in tatters as Devdas did, and it didn't even make me very sad, as Lootera, the year's other romantic tragedy starring Ranveer, did. I actually left the film curiously elated, though the film stays faithful, in its own fashion, to the play's denouenement. In the end, I suppose I carried away with me not that final bout of bloodshed, but the singing, dancing lovers, so obviously, entirely, vitally happy to be in love with each other.