Audient Bollywood: Bajirao Mastani

This is the fourth in my 2022 monthly series increasing my familiarity with Bollywood.

To this point I have operated on the assumption that whatever Bollywood does well, which so far appears to be quite a lot, it probably would never exceed about 75% of what Hollywood could do with the same material -- at least in terms of the core technical components of cinema.

Bajirao Mastani proved that wrong.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2015 historical epic, which was another of the films identified in Time Out's list of the ten best dance scenes in Hindi movie history, is just about as opulent and technically accomplished as any big Hollywood blockbuster. In fact, Lord of the Rings came to mind during some of the (relatively infrequent) battlefield shots, where a digital camera swooped over the soldiers like an eagle. I couldn't tell if most of the backdrops were real or digital, including impressive palaces and their grand interior chambers, and that's most assuredly a good thing. Likely many of them had to be digital, which means they work even better in a way.

I say it was "just about" as opulent and technically accomplished as a Hollywood film, because there were a few minor "glitches" here and there -- edits that seemed a little abrupt, a few moments of close combat that didn't have the advantage of Hollywood fight choreography, that sort of thing. Overall, though, wow -- what a feast for the eyes.

Of course, what Bajirao Mastani lacks in fight choreography, it more than makes up for in dance choreography.

Because the first dance number is a bit delayed here -- maybe not until about 30 minutes into the 158-minute movie -- for a moment I wondered if I might be getting my first Bollywood movie that did not have dance numbers. (Forgetting for a moment, I suppose, that I had identified this movie because it appeared on the Time Out list of memorable dance scenes.) But when those numbers came on, they came on strong -- and with each new number, I had to ask myself if this was the one the writer had been so impressed by, because each had a very strong candidacy.

First I'll tell you a little what the movie is about. It's an adaptation of the novel Rau, which I guess is already a pretty loose take on its subject -- the opening of the film greets us with a lengthy disclaimer about the attempts at historical accuracy, or lack thereof, of the movie we are about to watch. Rau considers the life of Baji Rao I (or Bajirao Ballal), the seventh "peshwa" (prime minister) of the Maratha empire, who was born in 1700, and his second wife, Mastani. Rao was a great conqueror who defeated Mughals at the Battle of Delhi and the Battle of Bhopal, among others, during a 20-year career as peshwa. And that's all the stuff I don't know about that I care to copy from Wikipedia at the moment.

The story touches on his military victories, and includes some really lovely digital artistic renderings of those battles in the opening credits and elsewhere -- the type you would see in similar Hollywood epics. But this is largely a movie about palace and political intrigue, as Rao's career and reputation were overshadowed by the fact that he took a second wife, a Muslim, despite ample evidence that his first wife (Kashi) was a pretty good catch and a pretty good person. The film makes it out to be that he was sort of duped into the arrangement, as he gave Mastani a dagger, possibly as thanks for saving him in battle. (This may be one of the things that didn't really happen.) In her culture, that was a sign of matrimonial intent on his part. As both a sign of his sense of duty and the fact that he's sort of smitten with her, he agrees to take her on as a second wife -- what the rest of the world sees, especially his traditional Hindu family, as a concubine. The story suggests that it's Mastani he really loves, which causes all sorts of problems for him.

I should stop here to point out a big discovery after the movie started: That first wife, Kashi, is played by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, then just Priyanka Chopra, who has subsequently starting appearing in Hollywood movies (and married Nick Jonas). Because I happen to have seen most of the Hollywood movies she's been in, I feel like I know her a bit, enough so that it seemed nice to see a bit of her origins -- even if those "origins" are only seven years ago. (Her actual cinematic origins go back nearly 20 years, so it would not be a surprise to stumble over her again in this series.) 

Anyway, she's really good here. Because she has graduated to sort of "media personality" status -- I believe I knew her that way before I had seen her in anything -- it felt safe for me to assume she probably wasn't that talented of a performer. Again, watch those assumptions. She can act and she certainly can dance, though it doesn't seem like she's doing her own singing. 

The other leads -- Ranveer Singh as Bajirao and Deepika Padukone as Mastani -- are also incredibly charismatic. When they're the center of their own dance numbers, you can't take your eyes off them.

Let's get to those dance numbers. And for the first time in this series, I'm going to do something that I probably should have done from the start, especially with opening film Dil Se -- include some clips for you to watch.

Without going back to consult the Time Out list during my viewing, I finally concluded that this must be the number that had made the writer's top ten list. It's led by the peshwa and is just overloaded with kinetic energy. The song is called "Malhari":

When I went to check the list, though, I found it was actually a song involving Bajirao's two women dressed in similar saris, called "Pinga." I suppose it's a less aggro/more feminine answer to this song, but is no less awesome:

I'd say the degree of difficulty is higher in "Malhari," but they are equally joyous.

And together they get at why I am enjoying this series so much. What's going on in the narrative is not necessarily joyous in both instances, but Bollywood dance numbers are able to step outside of what's going on in the story to give us something ecstatic on its own terms, without the need to be shackled to the narrative. "Malhari" is indeed celebrating a victory -- political rather than military in this instance, I believe -- but in "Pinga," Kashi is really not that excited about having to accept Mastani into her life through her husband. She does make a gesture by giving her this sari, but the song makes it look like they have truly mended fences, when they haven't really. That doesn't undercut the number's effectiveness in the slightest.

Bajirao Mastani was a big critical hit in India, winning all sorts of awards and becoming the fourth highest grossing movie of 2015. Though after watching it, I have to wonder which were the top three, and how they could top this in terms of production design, dance numbers, etc. 

I suppose as a dramatic narrative, maybe it is not always quite what it could be. I'm not sure I quite feel the tragic romance between the two main characters to the extent that Bhansali wants me to, perhaps because she's a bit stalkerish at certain points and he has a perfectly lovely wife already. But one trick the film does pull off, on a narrative level, is to have gotten me sort of interested in exploring Indian history -- about which I know almost nothing. I probably won't, but let's just say I started to go down a bit of a rabbit hole on it today before having to stop myself due to other commitments. 

On to May.