Bollywood spectacle a must-see
Ranveer Singh performs the Sultan as madder than a frog in a sock, with the moral code of a sociopath and the dress sense of a K Rd drag artist on his way to a Game of Thrones theme party.
Padmaavat (M, 164 mins) Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali ★★★★
Padmaavat opens with the longest and most specific set of disclaimers I have ever seen on a cinema screen.
We are assured that probably nothing we are about to see actually ever happened, and that even if it did then certainly no-one from any state or creed should be offended by the film-makers’ portrayal, and that it’s all based on an epic poem.
And, if you are still reading, that no animals – including, but not limited to, elephants, ostriches, love birds and camels – were harmed in the making of the film. Phew.
Padmaavat is a hugely controversial film in India.
It has been banned in several states, with threats of protests and vandalism scaring theatres into refusing to show the film and deterring family groups – especially – from seeing it. So I walked into a Wednesday night preview screening, at a moderately packed Embassy Theatre, not knowing what to expect.
And all I could think, walking out nearly three hours later, is that I really should make the effort to get to more Bollywood cinema. Padmaavat is a riot.
Yes, I get and respect that the source material and some of the lessons a more fanatical mind than mine could take from it are very problematic.
But on the screen, Padmaavat is a tumult of noise, colour, choreography, some unexpected jokes and a let’s-just-put-on-a-show spectacular that maybe only Bollywood still has the heart to make.
The film charts a 13th century war between nation states.
On one side are the armies of the Hindustani Sultan Allaudin Khilji.
On the other are the forces of the Maharawal Ratan Singh and his wife, the fabled beauty Queen Padmavati.
Padmaavat unfolds over a succession of battles, seductions, betrayals and a series of wildly overblown and deeply fabulous song and dance numbers that had me – at least – cheering and hooting in my seat.
Yes, it could be read as a blatantly anti-Islamic piece of nationalist propaganda. Ranveer Singh performs the Sultan as madder than a frog in a sock, with the moral code of a sociopath and the dress sense of a K Rd drag artist on his way to a Game of Thrones theme party.
Next to Singh’s scenerychewing antics, Shahid Kapoor’s rendition of the Maharawal is a relatively subdued round of gratuitous toplessness and limpid eyes fluttering suggestively above his mascara, interspersed with some interminable speechifying and a few moments of whirling sword play.
But it’s Deepika Padukone’s Queen Padmavati we’ve come to see, and the ex-model superstar makes the film her own in every scene she gets.
When her big moment arrives – and it is horribly distressing in many ways – Padukone strides out to meet destiny with a defiance and raw grace that truly put a bit of dust in my eye. What Padmaavat might mean to an Indian audience I can only guess at.
Among the crowd I sat with – more women than men – I was probably the only one who needed to read the subtitles, but I noticed everyone seemed happy and chatty as we left. I can only play what’s in front of me.
And to me, inheritor of a far spindlier cultural tradition than the one Padmaavat springs from, I can only say that this film is a nonstop spectacular.
It is by turns daft, jawdroppingly epic and often just plain lovable.
The dance scenes, one of which looks like the Lord of the Rings background extras decided to put on West Side Story in their lunch break, add up to some of the most endearingly silly minutes I’ve spent in a theatre in years. Padmaavat is a film that courts controversy.
There is a level at which it is indefensible.
And another at which it is just a film, based on source material that is nothing more than a myth from another age.
Your own take on it may well be different, and far better informed, than mine. At one juncture, asked his reasons for invading his neighbouring state, Singh’s Sultan intones, ‘‘I am going to war for beauty’’. One might guess, at that moment, maybe director Sanjay Leela Bhansali was thinking much the same thing. – Graeme Tuckett