Subhash K Jha speaks about Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela

 

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align="right"/> Just when you think you have seen it all, there comes a film that reminds you of Subhash K Jha speaks about Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela

 

how far the cinematic medium has come....And how far it can go in the right hands. And let's

 

face it. Bhansali is Bhansali. His visual imagery in all his earlier films from Khamoshi: The

 

Musical to Guzaarish is comparable with the best art from any field of

 

aesthetics.

 

You could say Bhansali's cinema is the visual equivalent of Lata Mangeshkar's singing. And you

 

wouldn't be wrong.

 

In terms of its free-flowing unmeasured operatic opulence Ram Leela (with or without the

 

censorial pre-fix) comes closest to the giddy high-pitched and yet miraculously controlled tempo

 

and tenor of Bhansali's Devdas. That too was a steeply sensuous cinematic adaptation from

 

a literary source. Ram Leela goes to Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet and comes away

 

with a marvel of a tale of love-at-first-sight. Bhansali tilts his hat to mythology, folklore

 

and the culture of community clashes with a blend of spontaneity and brilliance that comes

 

naturally to only this filmmaker, and no one else.

 

Bhansali's visuals remain as stunning and poetic as they were when he made his directorial

 

debut. What he does to Shakespeare's tumultuous saga of sudden love between scions of two

 

warring families is beyond the imagination of all other living filmmakers of this country. The

 

rigorous reworking of the Shakespearean classic required a certain sense of recklessness.

 

Earlier this year we saw some of the same creative recklessness in two other Bollywood

 

adaptations of Romeo & Juliet, namely Aanand Rai's Raanjhanaa and Manish Tiwary's

 

Issaq.

 

But Bhansali is Bhansali...Every image, every frame tells a story. Every shot in this brilliant

 

film has a place in his cosmos. You won't be left wondering for even a split second why you saw

 

what you just did.

 

It's all a part of a grand design. And yet so overflowing with an unrehearsed warmth and

 

vivacity, so brimming with spontaneous joie de vivre, and celebration, you wonder if

 

Shakespeare's play was written for this day when Bhansali's deconstruction of the material would

 

give to us characters who are many many sizes larger than life.

 

 

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align="right"/>Yup, size matters. And in the case of Ram Leela you can say that with a

 

wink. Bhansali's Romeo and Juliet are unabashedly sexual in the body and verbal language. None

 

of that traditional coyness and hesitation that characterizes traditional courtship when Ram and

 

Leela discuss one another's vital statistics. He runs a porn video parlour. She comes from a

 

family of gun-wielding criminals helmed by a steely matriarch (Supriya Pathak, brilliant). He

 

comments on her '136 inch' chest, she talks about his, er, trigger. They are in love and they

 

know lust is an integral component of their relationship.

 

No two lovers derived from a classic romance have celebrated their mutual sexual desires so

 

frankly and fearlessly.

 

Gosh, these two are Romeo and Juliet on steroids! And this is as good a place as any to tell you

 

that no other two actors could have done to Bhansali's Romeo/Ram and Juliet-Leela what Ranveer

 

and Deepika have done. They don't play the two characters. The couple owns their characters.

 

From the moment he spots her at a Holi bash, unholy thoughts begin to cross randy Ram's mind.

 

Ranveer plays Ram as a horny son-of-a-gun....and you can take that literally since there are

 

more gun's in Bhansali's colourful Gujarati town than there were in Anurag Kashyap's

 

Wasseypur.

 

As for Deepika Padukone...if Shakespeare was alive (and in many ways this film does bring him

 

back to life) he would have penned a full-blooded sonnet on Deepika's beauty and grace. When she

 

expresses anger she is molten lava and when she dances she is the epitome of feline grace. If

 

2013 is the year of the bewilderingly beautiful Padukone then Ram Leela is her piece de

 

resistance, and one that impels a standing ovation for the actress and her director. Yup, she

 

can show this one to her grandchildren with pride of ownership.

 

So much has been said about Bhansali's visual sense. But not enough. The way he composes the

 

shots to convey the passionate desperation of lovers who know they're running out of time is a

 

subject that textbooks can be written about. With a magician's dexterity Bhansali weaves the

 

characters into frames with seamless splendour magically making space for the passionate and the

 

tender.

 

In his quest for the most visually invigorating shots the director is here assisted amply by his

 

cinematographer Ravi Varman. Varman, let me state, uses the camera like Ustad Amjad Ali Khan

 

uses the Sarod. It's an instrument to converse with divinity. Wasiq Khan's art work too unfurls

 

a spiraling tapestry of kaleidoscopic colours that find a place in the hectic frames without

 

jostling or crowding the canvas.

 

 

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align="right"/> Of the innumerable imperishable images that emerge from Ram Leela's

 

tumultuous tale of overnight passion, elopement, estrangement and reunion, I'd single out two.

 

The first shows Barkha Bisht as Ranveer's widowed sister-in-law running away from a gang of

 

attackers. As she runs through the rugged hinterland her brass vessel tumbles down-slope with

 

her.

 

The sequence, caught in a desperately dying light, is probably the most vivid image of impending

 

doom I've seen in any recent film.

 

The other unforgettable image features Deepika, her hand bloodied after an injury, lying on the

 

wet ground in a streak of blood. It reminded me of Aishwarya Rai's slashed wrist creating a pond

 

of blood with her hand in Bhansali's Hum...Dil De Chuke Sanan.

 

Fire and blood are never far away from Bhansali's vision. Though there are plenty of bloodied

 

images in Ram Leela, the fire this time rages in the eyes of the characters.

 

Ram Leela's visual poetry is so eloquent you wonder at times if the filmmaker is a

 

closet-painter. A closet-musician, Bhansali certainly is. His self-composed songs assisted my

 

Monty Sharma's evocative background score perfectly capture the film's impetuous mood.

 

The actors do the rest. Every performer surrenders to the tempestuous saga. While Supriya Pathak

 

leads the supporting cast with a stellar performance, Richa Chadha, Abhimanyu Singh, Gulshan

 

Devaiah and Sharad Kelkar are the portrait of pitch-perfect emoting.

 

Really, you've never seen anything quite like this before. Exhilarating, tumultuous, passionate,

 

flamboyant, fluent and quite simply fabulous....Sanjay Bhansali's Gujju take on Romeo &

 

Juliet would have surely made Shakespeare giddy with joy. Brimming with exuberance and

 

energy Ram Leela's exalted aesthetics and powerhouse narration once again prove Bhansali

 

to be an incomparable storyteller. As for the Ranveer-Deepika pair, I finally know what

 

on-screen chemistry means. Their frankly erotic togetherness is comparable with Raj Kapoor and

 

Nargis in Awara.

 

Are they really in love? Who cares! Their on-screen collaboration would far out-distance

 

anything that they would share together or apart in real life.

 

Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela (phew!) is the most vital romantic musical in the last

 

five years. To experience it is to serenade the divine. To miss it would be a crime.

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