By snoadmin
Some kind of nothingness buds into some kind of constellation of love then lost love. This is what it is, in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s poetic new film “Saawariya.”
A huge part of this movie, however dreamy and fluid, relies on one of its most crushing aspects, which makes the entire journey sweeter and then weightless in the end. And it’s that Bhansali knows his movie would be an impossible reality, not even for a night in our dreams.
Bhansali composes in “Saawariya” an imaginary world hard to emulate. The movie threshes on a cool sweetness for its majority and then turns things sideways, and in the process the audience examines some of humans’ deepest emotions. Yet, it’s all very fantasy-like, the one thing that’d save one from jumping into the screen to save the starry-eyed protagonist, Raj.
In this new hit from Bollywood, we meet a character unfulfilled and waiting for life’s natural magic to strike. He is a symphony of grays on the inside, though a monolithic influence to the people in his surroundings.
Call it a form of karma, call it a symbol for suffering or call it the condition of Raj, played by newcomer Ranbir Kapoor, whose storm of talent includes de rigueur dancing and, as it appears on film, singing (Kapoor pulls a Britney Spears here; the soundtrack lists the rightful singing sensations, actually).
Raj is known as Saawariya, or “rock star,” to his closest admirers who accumulate at the local nightclub where he works alongside Gulab (Rani Mukherjee), who immediately gets Raj’s drift.
Raj, being the unsettled dreamer that he is, tramples into Gulab’s neighborhood, a starry Red Light District, where he is transported into a vision of seeing his self-worth.
The setting becomes arousing with its visual saturation of splendor and mystery. It is a place that can be imagined as in a past time, as well as in the future. The lakes have no end and the backdrops are brightly embellished with oversized lotuses and Buddhas. In contrast to the smoky faraway, there is a pulse of blues and greens that help unfold this dreamscape of a world.
Suddenly, things start to click for Raj. He makes the transition from marginal pedestrian to poet and romantic. He has aspirations that could blossom into culminating a talent as tall as Fred Astaire’s. Rapidly, he becomes a sort of local Romeo, too, making the women swoon.
With Raj’s infectious dancebody in business, he puts the prostitutes to work by doing some dancing in a vast shimmery unison. Then, with Gulab’s help, Raj is pointed in a safe direction to Lillian, an older woman who lives abandoned with ghosts of her dead son and husband.
And right when Raj’s whistle becomes too heavy he meets Sakina, played by Sonam Kapoor, also a newcomer to the Bollywood scene. She is the missing piano, viola, trumpet and trombone to Raj’s orchestra.
This is where takeoff begins.
Their affection for each other is fast and better said without words or configured through a kind of geometry. It is more like a gesture or emotion, like one that’s interwoven in India’s highly personal relationship with worshipping the seasons.
In “Saawariya,” there is a steady magic that brushes over the obsession of the moon as an object of worship. In Sakina’s case, she is all about the moon. It’s this specific kind of yearning where the lust and masks of her true love come off.
In Indian folk tradition, this is where the person stands up and asks for nature to bring to them something they’ve sweated out in unbearable lengths of anticipation.
“No dark can harm those enlightened by love,” Sakina mutters in her most forward moment, crushing the silence of her gashed yearning for another man, Imaan.
Without the sex and without vulgarity, this movie plays along with an infatuation and passion almost too wrong to live by. It is something undreamt of in American cinema today, which makes watching this Hindi film like being lost in a fairy tale wonderland, all while enjoying the task of reading the subtitles.
Visually, there is not a smudge of imperfection anywhere.
The motion of the story and its unfolding is yoga-like and painless.
Yet, the most crushing part could be digesting the part about lost love, and if it can be survived by dreamers like Raj.
