Why did you watch this movie?. Review on Bajirao Mastani

You sense you are in the presence of something extraordinarily creative the minute you step into the world of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani, a costume drama clothed in the conceit of the times when royal arrogance permitted social injustices as a birthright, and brought to incandescent life by a filmmaker who understands the layered language of opulence better than any contemporary filmmaker.

By now everyone knows Bajirao Mastani is the story of forbidden love between Peshwa Bajirao Ballal and Mastani, the warrior-princess who falls in love after he comes to her kingdom’s rescue. It’s also the story of Kashibai, Bajirao’s gamine-like wife who’s the most interesting character in the tempestuous triangle. The three roles are infused with infinite irradiance by Ranveer, Deepika and Priyanka. They bring to the director’s passionate palate an inner conviction that eventually leave us spellbound and hankering for more.

The magician who uses colours to convey emotions Bhansali conceives the Bajirao-Mastani liaison as a striking fusion of the saffron and green colours. The two colours dominate Bhansali’s palate, spilling over in streams of drama. The spoken words are at once colloquial and royal, so that the audience don’t get isolated from the cascade of rhetorics. Indeed Prakash Kapadia’s dialogues are, in many vital ways, the plot’s backbones. The characters exhale a verbal vitality that never slips into verbosity. We can’t imagine them speaking in any other way.

I specially liked a sequence where Deepika’s Mastani, armed with the confidence of a woman consumed by love no matter how forbidden, barges into the christening ceremony of her lover’s legitimate baby boy. When taunted for tainting the occasion with green, Mastani gently reminds the congregation that saffron and green, are at the end of the day, blood brothers used in Hindu and Muslim religious events.