Padmaavat BO & Review Thread - ALL DISCUSSIONS HERE ONLY - Page 45

Padmaavat review: Nothing new to offer

It's not easy being Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

It's not easy when opposition, violent at that, rolls over like an angry black cloud, threatening to engulf your latest dream -- just as it had threatened your earlier ones -- preparing to destroy it even before it can completely take shape.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali is a man of tremendous courage to have faced all the problems he has -- from violent protests, to death threats against him and his lead actress, to state-wide bans, to court cases, to threats of jauhar -- and to refuse to curtail his creative process, to step back from his latest film, Padmaavat.

Yet, given all of this, there is no denying the fact that a film takes on a different life when it releases.

It will be subject to praise, to criticism, to disdain, to love.

It now has a new master, the viewer, who will decide its fate not just at the box office but, more importantly, in their hearts.

And so it will be with Padmaavat, which has -- during its making -- faced tremendous opposition from royalty to commoners alike.

There is no doubt -- and this is something that the film-maker has proved time and again -- that when it comes to mounting a magnificent spectacle, Bhansali has few challengers in the Hindi film industry.

Padmaavat's locations are majestic, the costumes glorious, the make-up perfect and the songs lovingly choreographed (ah, yes, the special effects could clearly could do with more finesse).

His queens -- Deepika Padukone as Padmavati, Aditi Rao Hydari as Mallika Mehrunissa and Anupriya Goenka as a barely there as Nagmati, Maharwal Ratan Singh's first wife and the Maharani of Chittod -- look suitably gorgeous and carry off their exquisite costumes with grace and ease (Yes, Deepika's nubile waist has been digitally draped in the Ghoomar song to soothe offended sensibilities).

His kings underscore, and re-underscore, their stated characters to ensure there is no confusion.

Shahid Kapoor as Maharwal Ratan Singh and the hero in this saga is suitably courageous, even if he is shown to completely ignore his first wife on the arrival of the second.

Ranveer Singh as the rapacious, power-loving Allauddin Khilji is suitably bestial in his gluttonous appetite for the pleasures of the flesh as he wolfs down chunks of meat and sates his physical desires with equal enthusiasm, throwing in guttural growls to express almost every emotion -- from rage to lust.

Both sport suitable scars as witnesses to their bravery in the battlefield.

There is no subtlety here; black is black and white is white and Bhansali, clearly, wants no shades of grey in his magnum opus.

The 'good' Hindu hero, mostly dressed in creams and whites, is heroic and honourable; the 'evil' Muslim villain, mostly dressed in black, is shown to be animalistic, with no control over his desires, be it political or carnal.

A romance with his male slave, Malik Kafur -- Jim Sarbh, who seems confused as to whether he is acting in a film or performing in a play -- otherwise hinted at, is clearly outlined when Ratan Singh's minister disparagingly refers to him as Allaudin's begum.

Padmavati's perfection too needs contrast to be highlighted -- her beauty blinds the equally beautiful Mehrunissa who feels her husband cannot be blamed for his obsession; Nagmani has to be shown as a petulant wife against the perfect partner that is Padmavati.

It is this play of black and white that is the foundation of the confusing fairy tale world Bhansali has created.

In this world, a princess who seems to have great faith in Buddhism is also a hunter.

In this world, a princess can get close to a man she does not know.

In this world, a missive by an enemy king as a challenge for battle can set afire by a Rajput queen even before her husband, the king, reads it.

In this same patriarchal, masculine world, Rajput soldiers readily take orders from the younger queen.

The biggest tragedy of Padmaavat is that it has nothing new to offer. We've seen Bhansali create similar picturesque frames before.

We've seen those overhead shots showcasing dance performances.

The dialogues are stilted and old-fashioned -- 'Loha lohe ko kaatha hai,' Singh explains his decision to battle solo with Allaudin.

There are familiar references to both mythology and history.

Padmavati, who is hunting a deer, accidentally shoots Ratan Singh like Prince Dashrath did Shravan Kumar. Only, here, it results romance and not a tragic death.

She brings her husband back from the jaws of death, like Savithri did Satyavan.

Like the soldiers hidden in the Trojan horse, Padmavati sneaks in Rajput soldiers as her maids.

If Babur inspired his war-weary soldiers by renouncing wine in the battle against Rana Sangha, Allaudin inspired his siege-weary army by flinging the Khilji flag to the ground.

Bhansali even pays tribute to the famous climax of Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala. But that powerful, unforgettable, climax become a farce here.

And as the women move towards the giant pyre, Bhansali employs a couple of unnecessary shots that leave a bitter taste when he focuses his camera on a couple of child brides and a heavily pregnant woman. It smacks of a cheap attempt at evoking emotions.

Which is what Padmaavat misses out on.

As the film progresses, you tire of the been-there seen-that spectacle.

You want a story.

You want good dialogue, not the corny words you are hearing.

You want an emotional connect. You want a tighter film.

Sadly, with Padmaavat, that's not what you get.

Rediff Rating:

Savera R Someshwar / Rediff.com

Originally posted by: desigal90

Bhansali is the master of making things look beautiful. I don't understand why people get so excited every time his movies come out coz of the trailer and the dance numbers. They are just a glimpse of the grandeur and glamor that's put into the film.That's what his strength his. But his movies lack compelling stories.

The only good thing about Bajirao Mastani was Kashi's character, aka Priyanka. Both Bajirao and Mastani were losers of the nth degree.

Padmaavat Review: Rajput pride played out on a loop

'Sanjay Leela Bhansali's historical characters behave as though they are already aware of the chapters that will be dedicated to them and the sonnets that will be written in their memory.'
'And yet, they talk relentlessly about making and remaking history.'
'Can anything be more superficial?' asks Sreehari Nair.

Those who could not laugh at the campy pleasures that the Baahubali films delivered may find very little in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat that will sustain their interest.

Even within the world of camp, there are grades; and if there was an innocence about the campy values that Baahubali espoused, it's seriously absent here, in this faux-solemn piece of work that is less a film and more a filmed play.

If the beauty of cinema is in the rhythmic flow of images, Bhansali plunges us into a run of sets.

There's the hellish-looking Khilji-Dynasty Set filled with rotten air and which looks lighted for betrayal to creep in, any moment.

And then there's the Mewar-Dynasty Set of glossy souls, who romance under the watchful eyes of Buddha statues, and who allow the gurgling sounds of water-fountains to punctuate their lines.

I get it, making his settings remote is one excuse for Bhansali to make his characters unlike anybody we may know (though, if this is how humans behaved in the 13th century, then evolution is certainly no myth), but God, how they talk!

We are looking at a period in history when metaphor wasn't a figure of speech -- it was speech.

But don't be unsettled by their overabundance; for the metaphors here are carriers for merely five concepts that are played out on loop: Love, Hurt, Rajputana Pride, Teer, and Nishaana.

If the arrows don't kill you, the exhibition of pride surely will!

I agree that calling Bhansali a 'mad genius' would be like giving blood to a tired staple such as the 'drunkard philosopher', but there's a maniacal quality about the man's continuing pursuit of a single theorem: Of Passion being an all-consuming force.

It is this all-consuming passion that had compelled the Alauddin Khilji of the Malik Muhammad Jayasi poem (the source material for this movie) to lay siege to the Chittor fort of Raja Ratan Singh (here, Shahid Kapoor).

Granted this is yet another stab at Bhansali's pet theorem; how do you still respond to the Ghuroor of a man who says 'Ghuroor' like a dopehead?

Ranveer Singh's Alauddin Khilji, while being the only genuinely interesting aspect of Padmaavat, is high style and no mystery.

Singh plays him like a performer, a man who lives for his excesses -- an Ostrich-for-an-Ostrich-feather man.

The actor is clearly trying to give his character more shadings than his director allows him and in a sequence where he sits burning papers inside a war tent, he seems almost like a ruthless employer disposing off his union's demands.

That Sanjay Leela Bhansali loves to over-scale his characters is no secret, but in gleefully rolling out a character that's already over-scaled, Bhansali forgets to ask his Khilji a fundamental question: Is his quest for Padmavati driven by authentic desires -- lust, power -- or is it simply one of his games?

In the way Bhansali conceives the lout and despite Singh's many flourishes, the whole battle for the Queen feels purely like one of Khilji's games; not a topic that would keep him up at nights, but just something to pass his daytime.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali may think he has created an overflowing beast complete with his fur coats and slobby habits, but such is his Khilji's elaborate celebration of bestiality that Bhansali doesn't prepare him well enough to lose his grace.

In short, the movie's only interesting character feels like a total idiot by the end.

When Khilji sinks, he's just another Hindi film baddie -- all his weird tastes, lifestyle choices, poetries, and pets reduced to sand.

He goes down, not like Phoenix but like an Alabaster bird, and what stays with you are his mechanical chirpings.

Also, for all his show of libido, this Khilji seems more of an Onanist than a real practitioner of sex, and there's more dry humping here than any movie in recent memory -- the film is as asexual as it comes!

There's Jim Sarbh as Malik Kafur, Khilji's general and alleged homosexual lover, sounding like an out-of-breath, sibilant German toy. And since Bhansali is not one to keep his subtexts below the text, he pitches Kafur like the emperor's phallus-conscience -- pointing him toward his natural sexual preference, and rising every time Khilji hints at turning flaccid.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali chooses specific lighting patterns for his women and he often dresses them in colours that reflect the mood of the sequences they appear in -- pivotal moments in red, for example -- but wholeness of conception isn't a standout feature of Bhansali's women.

Deepika Padukone gets an absolute raw deal as the Queen; her performance is submissively overwrought, blandly weighted, and her speeches combined with the leisureliness of the narrative's pacing, can put you in a stupor.

Worst of all, you will be driven by the suspicion if Padukone even does enough to deserve the movie's title.

Shahid Kapoor's Raja Ratan Singh comes off as a split; he has a sweet-faced humility that he must shed every now and then to remind himself of his tough heritage.

To Padukone's credit, she at least looks at her Raja in a way that suggests longing, but Kapoor does not come halfway to meet her.

Bhansali has made this movie with both eyes trained on the audience and he recycles elements which he believes 'worked' in Bajirao Mastani.

Raza Murad's character, for instance, may just have submitted to a change of headgear, and Ranveer Singh gets yet another meth-fuelled, self-congratulatory dance to celebrate his high-point.

Bhansali has never had any interest in the external world, and here again the supporting actors are all scaled down till they are subhuman and acting on their knees.

Aayam Mehta as Raghav Chetan, (the banished court intellectual of the Mewars who feeds Khilji stories of Padmavati's beauty and instigates him to attack Chittor), tries to stand up against the leads, and is soon condensed to just a head.

Finally it is left to the two men, Ratan Singh and Alauddin Khilji -- each with gashes that pop out on their faces -- to stage a one-on-one confrontation, in the toys-for-boys style, for the ownership of Padmavati.

And she reacts like how a Bhansali woman does when asked to choose between the boring and the boorish.

There were two fleeting moments in the movie that had me hooked, primarily because they occurred without any showiness whatsoever.

Before Ratan Singh and Alauddin Khilji meet for the first time, we are parallely taken through scenes of them being decked up: Ratan Singh by Padmavati, and Khilji by Malik Kafur. The mirroring there is both revelatory and kinky, as we are told with a wink who the queen is, and who the begum.

And then there's a passing scene of an old woman doing her version of the Ghoomar song, and someone taunts her into stopping, warning her that that she might sprain her waist.

Why did such a simple sequence stick out in my memory so vividly? Because it was about the only case of behaviour in 163 minutes of Padmaavat's running time; the only time I felt like I could touch the people who were being projected up on screen.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's historical characters behave as though they are already aware of the chapters that will be dedicated to them and the sonnets that will be written in their memory.

And yet, they talk relentlessly about making and remaking history.

Can anything be more superficial?

Their grandiosity notwithstanding, every time I walk out of a Bhansali film, I am overcome by a tremendous urge to watch a rough cut of some picture that's yet to be assembled; a piece of student's cinema; or a sloppy effort at movie-making that doesn't attempt to cover its tracks and instead offers itself generously to the watcher.

Perfection can benumb you even as it overwhelms; Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the towering perfectionist, works only to whet my appetite for imperfection.

Originally posted by: opsora2090

Bollywood GanduVerified account@BollywoodGandu

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26m26 minutes ago
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#Padmaavat is the biggest suspense movie ever. You never know until the end of the movie who will die - Khilji, Ratan Singh, Padmavati or the audience.

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Originally posted by: StinsonIsHere

Ermm! That was sarcasm. BollywoodGandu aka Karan Talwar is a stand up comic. It's not a compliment. He took a jibe.
😆

Originally posted by: opsora2090

I know that ... but as this is a review Thread , Hopefully here negative-comedy reviews or Tweets r also allowed on beside of Positive ,regarding This movie .