An exercise in how NOT to tell a story. Review on Saawariya

All right, I will come out and say it. I am not a big fan of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. In fact, I don’t like his movies at all. I didn’t like either Black or Devdas very much, and the less we talk about Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam the better. For someone who has only ever made five movies – over a period of twelve years – he gets a remarkably large proportion of them horribly wrong. They say Khamoshi was better – I haven’t seen it yet – but even if it is, one out of five is hardly a strike rate anyone would be proud of.

More worryingly, there is a distinct pattern to his movies. If it is a SLB movie, expect the theme to be treated as superficially as possible and the characters to be drawn out just as shallowly. The characters will inhabit a world and behave in ways their lives are completely at odds with, and once you throw in other things like lack of honest research(read Black), you have pretty much reached a stage where every accepted norm of telling a story has been thoroughly binned. And we haven’t even started talking about the set design.

No matter which of the five movies you consider, the sets get full marks if your criterion is visual splendour. But having said that, let’s ask ourselves a question: Is a set, or in other words, the world in which the story takes place, independent of the story? Or is it a means to tell your story better? For example, in his latest offering Saawariya, Sakina(Sonam Kapoor) tells her companion Raj(Ranbir Kapoor) that their family is struggling financially, and yet we see open-staircases, beautiful jewellery and manicured hands at every turn – in short, the exact opposite of financial hardship. Can you call such a set well-designed?

Saawariya is an adaptation of a Russian folk-tale, so they made the city look like a page out of a fairy tale book. Fine, no crime in that. But why not make the characters Russian as well? Or if that is too much to ask for, shoot in an Indian city. What you can’t do is have Indian characters with Indian names and Indian ways of life in a very un-Indian like city, because by doing that, you are alienating your characters from the world in which they live. Even if it is a beautiful world, it is not theirs, and it impedes the story because of that.

Speaking of stories, there are simple stories and complex stories, and perhaps more pertinently, there are short stories and long stories(otherwise known as novels). If you choose to adapt a short story into a 150-minute movie, you better have good writers, and some good character-development skills. Bhansali had neither; all he had was his beloved set – and a whole lot of songs.

Music is such a hopelessly subjective experience(even more subjective than an analysis of a movie, I mean) that I don’t want to wager anything on whether the songs will be a success or not. I will make two very short, very personal points, though. One, I thought the songs were lacking in rhythm. Two, there were too many of them. Oh, I almost forgot, and this is for the ladies, you get a full view of Ranbir Kapoor’s behind for a whole millisecond. Or do they have different censor rules for overseas releases?

Leaving behinds where they belong, though, Ranbir Kapoor was impressive for the most part, considering the quality of dialogues he had to deliver and the expectations he had to live up to. As you would expect, there were some subtle hints thrown here and there just to remind us of his bloodline, like the Awara hat and the name of the character(Ranbir Raj). The nerdier ones among you would also have noticed the parallels between some scenes in this movie and those in Awara, for instance the “Haan, badmaash hoon, laphanga hoon” scene. Interestingly, Sonam Kapoor does not get to act out any of her father’s famous scenes; we can only speculate as to why.

She does get to do a lot of giggling and blushing, though, and since that is just about the only requirement for a Bollywood heroine, I suspect she will do quite well for herself in the years to come. Also, she is very easy on the eye and reportedly looking forward to do glamorous roles in the future, two things I am sure future producers have taken note of. Salman Khan is neither here nor there, one because he is hardly in the film in the first place, and two because he didn’t have a chance to strip. And we all know how bad Salman can be when he is not allowed to go topless. Rani Mukherjee and the rest go through the motions adequately enough.

Cinematography was, more than anything else, done with a fresh approach, fresh in the sense that all lighting used in the movie was artificial. Not once in the entire movie do you see even a semblance of natural light. All the action takes place amid hues of blue and green in an indoor set with a built-in stream and a bridge over it. Is this Bhansali paying another tribute to Raj Kapoor? I don’t know, but at a time when only dream sequences are shot in indoor locations, shooting a whole movie in artificial light does make it a little unique. That apart, the actual cinematographic techniques used were in no way special.

There will be people who will tell you Saawariya is brilliance incarnate and that you have to have a heart of an artist to appreciate it. In fact, I have heard many people describing it as “poetic”, though I don’t quite know how a movie can be poetic. I concede the heretofore unseen “shoot everything in blue-green” technique does sometimes appeal to the eye, but for me, a purpose of a movie is to tell a story, and all elements of a movie should aid in doing precisely that. In this case, the setting and the lighting take away from it rather than add to it, and for that reason the cinematography has to be called scratchy at best.

We are story-telling animals. We want to be told stories in every form of art. A great painting is one that invites you into its world through its canvas. You go to a photography class, and the first thing they tell you is every photograph should tell a story. The same theme resonates in writing too, where the realism of the reader’s experience depends on the authenticity of the world you describe. Movies are but an extension of books, and the same rules apply, even more stringently so, because there is nothing left to the imagination. To see a movie maker so blatantly neglect the fundamentals of story-telling is sad to see, and that he is considered one of our nation’s best directors is sadder still.