Padmaavat
Starring Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor, Aditi Rao Hydari, Jim Sarbh
Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali
As Sanjay Bhansali’s stunning Padmaavat re-opens in theatres, Subhash K Jha looks back at this seminal celluloid creation.
Padmaavat created a storm much before its release when the Karni Seva took it upon itself to stage violent protests against the masterpiece. Padmaavat was a labour of love. As in all of Bhansali’s films, there are visuals in Padmaavat that will be remembered for all times to come. And this is as opportune a time as any to salute Bhansali’s cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee, who is a magician, a visionary par excellence who can put on-screen images that poets and painters put into their creations when at the acme of inspiration.
Almost every moment in the story that Bhansali tells of the royal Queen Padmavati and the Islamic invader who lusts after her is pure magic. The mesmerizing mise-en-scène hooks you from the word go when, in a spellbinding introduction, the Queen on a hunting trip manages to wound Raja Ratan Singh in more than one. Love–stuck and besotted Shahid Kapoor’s Ratan Singh makes it very clear that he would do anything in his power to protect the beauty and sanctity of the woman he falls in love with and marries.
Palace intrigue is always a high point in Bhansali’s operatic dramas. In Bajirao Mastani we saw Deepika Padukone as the royal queen who ends up being the second wife of a nighbouring empire. A similar fate awaits Deepika in Padmaavat. While the conflict between the two wives in Bajirao Mastani was conspicuously contoured, in Padmaavat, Deepika’s Padmaavati barely manages to interact with her husband’s first wife (played by Anupriya Goenka).
It is Padmaavati’s conflict with her invader and intended violator, Allauddin Khilji, which occupies center stage in this rigorous drama of resonant historicity. On many occasions the historical facts are tampered with for the sake of edifying the essential conflict between the Queen and her invader. Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh bring an exquisite operatic duet-like feeling to their parts. Though they sing the same song from different scales, they are like the earth and sky never destined to meet.
Bhansali imparts a portentous potency to their conflict. Without coming face-to-face, the two actors convey almost unbearable dramatic tension. The climax with all of the Rani’s female entourage fighting off the advances of Khilji by hurling hot coal bricks on him, is a reverberant homage to Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala.
Remember Naseeruddin Shah’s moustache-twirling subedaar in Mehta’s film lusting after the feisty Sonbai (Smita Patil)? Bhansali’s Padmavati echoes Sonbai with heartening whoops of joy. Indeed, this is a film that pays a homage to the greatest filmmakers of the country, Raj Kapoor and K Asif, and succeeds in going beyond the vision of these two filmmakers.
The sequences at the end of the film featuring Deepika Padukone and a bevy of women all wearing flaming red will stay with you for a very long time. I am afraid Shahid Kapoor, as Padmavati’s husband, seems a little shaky in his attempts to counter Ranveer’s psychotic Khilji with regal restraint. Shahid internalizes his character’s struggles to an extent that makes him look bored at times.
But there is no dearth of bravura acting in Padmaavat. While Ranveer and Deepika as antagonists rip the screen part, two other actors, Jim Serbh and Aditi Rao, shine in smaller roles, bringing to their part as Khilji’s manipulative toy-boy and idealistic wife a strong sense of a back history that belies the length of their roles.
Padmaavat is a work of illimitable splendor. The 3D format seems quite an unnecessary grandeur-enhancement device. When we already have so much to savour and imbibe, why hanker for more? This is a film so inured in irradiance and so steeped in splendor you will come away from the experience exhilarated and satiated.
This is a movie so epic in proportion that it stands tall among the great films of all time about love and war. In Bhansali, we have our own David Lean. Padmaavat proves it.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali still recalls with a shuddering smile the trauma that he went through while making Padmaavat when he and the film were attacked by a right-wing group.“It was crazy! Through all of it, I was more worried about my mother and happy that she was with me. I don’t know how I’d have survived without her at my side. She kept saying, ‘Mere bete ke saath aisa kyon ho raha hai? Woh itni achchi filmein banata hai’. My mother was my pillar of strength.”
But Sanjay never thought of giving up. “Never. Not at all. Never! That would’ve been the end of me as a filmmaker. Every time I was attacked, I used my pain and suffering as an impetus to work better. I channelized all my anxiety into making Padmaavat. I think suffering has always been an incentive for my creativity.”
So was Padmaavat history or fiction. Or both? Explains the brilliant director, “It was based on the poem Padmawat by Malik Mohammed Jayasi. But it also had figures and incidents taken from actual history. I was fascinated by Rani Padmavati from my childhood. Her grace, dignity, valour, and inner strength are very inspiring. I wanted to make a film on her life for a very long time. But before I could do the film, I got the chance to direct the stage musical version of Padmavati, an opera in two acts by the French composer Albert Roussel that I directed in Paris in 2008.”
However, the film had nothing to do with the Opera. “Not at all. That Padmavati was a staged musical done on a lavish scale with elephants, tigers, and other animals on stage. It was an entirely different experience from the film. This is the first time I explored evil in such dark deep detail. I had never before gone into this zone before. To portray evil on this scale was a new and challenging experience for me.”
Ranveer Singh got incredible reviews for his villainous act. Was Bhansali at all unsure of his cast’s box office status after Ranveer’s Befikre, Deepika Padukone after XXX, and Shahid Kapoor after Rangoon? “Not at all! It made no difference to me whether they had successes or flops behind them. I wanted these actors and only these three actors. And I am so happy with the quality of performances they have gave in my film,” says Bhansali.
