Filmi Geek

Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (2015)

प्रेम रतन धन पायो

Dir. Sooraj Barjatya

Some of the most awkward moments of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo come when it tries to be progressive and modern while still hewing to its regressive Rajshri roots.  When our hero Prem (Salman Khan, of course) learns that the princess Maithili (Sonam Kapoor) has slept with her royal fiancé before the marriage was solemnized, he tries to look shocked, then tries to shrug his shoulders in acceptance. The whole scene falls flat; it's not cute or hip, it's just uncomfortable for both Khan and audience. Later, when Maithili makes it clear to Prem that she wants to have sex with him (he's a doppelganger stand-in for the real fiancé-prince, incapacitated by an assassination attempt), Prem just looks stern and pained. Is he wrestling with his own desire for Maithili, a temptation to take advantage of his resemblance to the prince, and of her?  Is he a little repulsed that the woman he idealizes and adores is so ready to succumb to an immoral desire?  The scene doesn't make it clear, and that inscrutability may be a bit of sleight of hand by director Sooraj Barjatya - you, dear viewer, may supply whatever interpretation best suits your worldview.

Points to Barjatya, anyway, for daring to acknowledge (under the Rajshri banner no less) that an adult woman in 2015 might have sexual desires and be bold and aggressive about acting on them.  And then some points docked, at the end, for having the royal family - including the recovered prince - offer Maithili to Prem as their gift to him. What could better underscore that women are mere property to be negotiated for and transferred as their families see fit?  Maithili gets her happy ending, but only because her fiancé and her grandmother are willing to hand her over to another man.  

Admittedly, life is different for royal scions, even in the 21st century when their regality is only a matter of tradition, not a matter of power and military allegiance.  Maithili has been raised to value such traditions and know her role in them, and promised to Prince Vijay under that same set of values. But Maithili's submission to them, as cinematic message-delivery, is really no different from a spirited village girl submitting to her family's expectations in a movie of 30 years ago.  Though Barjatya's worlds are always scaled by enormous sprawling mansions and populated with the most extreme members of the leisure classes, the people they portray are stand-ins for an aam aadmi audience. Viewers are meant to identify with them, as a means of escape - imagine yourself, for three hours, a part of this world where everyone is beautiful, where people gift exotic sports cars to one another on whim, where even the crummy substandard home occupied by cast-off royal bastards is twice as big as anything you've ever lived in.  And if you want to be like them, you also of course must also act like them. So the packaging and sale of Maithili is not just a matter of royal obligation; it's a model for young women, even sexually forward young women, to follow. Kings and princesses, as Shakespeare had Henry V point out, are the makers of fashion. 

And what about that Barjatya world - is it still entertaining, 20 years after Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, to be whisked away into a sparkling kind of Maine-Pyar-Kiya-meets-Mughal-e-Azam fairy tale world where princes ride in horse-drawn carriages while taking calls on their iPhone 6es and kings build crystal palaces on the precipices of waterfalls?  Well, yes - most of the time, it is.  Prem Ratan Dhan Payo is pretty to look at and loaded with good-enough songs and picturizations, and even a few excellent ones - a picturization that is a battle-of-the-sexes football match is especially fun, as is a song that breaks out when Prem and his buddy are left to cool their heels on top of a desert fort, and somehow find a set of giant drums to bang on.  Indeed, except for some melodramatic indulgence in the last third - including interminable fight scenes cleverly staged in a mirrored maze - its nearly-three-hour running time doesn't really feel that long.  It's a very simple story, with its mixture of Prince-and-Pauper tropes with classic Barjatya themes that elevate family above all other concerns.  But the grand visuals are appealing, and throwbacky melodrama can be unchallenging fun on its own terms. 

Salman Khan is not quite in his finest form; this incarnation of Prem doesn't match the sweet innocence of Bajrangi Bhaijaan.  He is too beatific, almost sanctimonious in his confidence that love can fix all that is wrong in the royal family.  He takes on a smarminess that Barjatya's Prems of 20 or 25 years ago never had. That means that if you already don't like Sallu, Prem Ratan Dhan Payo is not the film that will change your mind.  The rest of the cast ranges from serviceable to good enough to elevate the material they have to work with.  Sonam Kapoor gives a mostly adequate performance; I am not convinced she has rajkumari-level gravitas in her, but she is not distractingly bad.  The show stealers are the same folks who almost ran off with Tanu Weds Manu - Deepak Dobriyal as goofy Prem's manic sidekick, and Swara Bhaskar as the prince's estranged, illegitimate half-sister.  The latter so capably shoulders her melodramatic role and so expertly carries its heightened emotions that perhaps Barjatya should make her his lucky charm from now on, and finally put Prem out to pasture. 

Darr (1993)

डर 

Dir. Yash Chopra

Watching this movie made me think about the not-so-fine line between courtship and stalking. Hindi films have, frustratingly, blurred that line for decades. Occasionally, a film comes along that attempts to explore it artfully. Raanjhanaa is one such; it utterly failed for me, but it arguably did attempt to do say something about the boundary where courtship ends and stalking begins.

Darr doesn't explore this boundary. It doesn't even acknowledge that it resides in a vast industry of films that sometimes have trouble telling the difference.  Instead it blows right through the boundary, leaving it so far behind in the dust that there is never any question whether anything it portrays should be interpreted as romantic.  

Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) occupies a deeply creepy, dangerous, and psychopathic territory. He is not a superficially or initially charming man shown to turn dangerous upon rejection.  Rather, it is clear from the film's earliest scenes, in which he carries on spirited telephone conversations with his dead mother,  that he operates at a disconnect from reality.  Not a shred of subtlety in Rahul's conduct disturbs Darr's smooth sheen of bombast. There is no gaslighting, no insidiousness.  The crazy is obvious.  Kiran (Juhi Chawla) is its blameless, helpless victim.

I can see why fans of Shah Rukh Khan might enjoy Darr. In it, he dials his hamming to a different frequency, in which the famous quivering lip produces the name "K-K-K-Kiran" rather than a hero's declaration of romance. In that way Rahul is more interesting than Khan's villainous character in Anjaam, who, until he actually turns murderer, is almost indistinguishable from other SRK heroes of that era - arrogant, smarmy, entitled. Rahul is broken, has been broken for years by the premature loss of his mother; it's not clear whether his status as college weirdo is a cause or an effect of the pathology that makes him stalk Kiran. 

But other than this interesting, if stereotyped, portrayal of a man on the fringes of sane society, Darr veers off in odd directions - one especially clunky sequence is the the "just say no" speech that Rahul's drug-addicted classmate remorsefully delivers just before Rahul offs him and plants evidence that he (the classmate) is Kiran's stalker.  But Darr is still a Yash Chopra film, and it does offer some of the grandly satisfying filmi elements that one expects from Chopra. The apex of these is, of course, the Holi song "Ang se ang lagana," in which Juhi Chawla looks purely radiant while a mad-eyed, snarlingly sinister Shah Rukh Khan lurks threateningly among the musicians. 

Darr lacks the thematic layers that make the second half of Anjaam so interesting and satisfying. Here, instead of the demi-divine power of womanhood ignited by injustice, revenge for Kiran comes in the form of Sunil (Sunny Deol), a one-man naval commando unit. Sunil has a barrel chest and big strong arms and presses both into service to protect his young fiancée. This is, of course, Sunny Deol's wheelhouse; whether in service of India herself or India's most vulnerable young women, Deol is ready to set his jaw and throw a lot of punches.  It is always good fun to get a taste of Deol's jingoistic military-hero persona on full display.

Sunil's competence as a protector doesn't leave much for Juhi Chawla to do, though. She is wasted here, doing little more than swooning into Deol's arms and flash dimples in the larger-than-life snapshots that Rahul projects on his bedroom wall.*  I think she lands a few blows in the climactic scene in which Rahul traps Kiran on a boat, before Sunil swims in (navy commando, remember?) to save the day.  Chawla is lovely, for sure, and the little drag performance she gives for Deol is rather delicious. But it would be nice to see a woman who is perhaps a little less helpless in the face of male entitlement gone psycho.  What would have happened to Kiran if she had no strapping Sunil eager to protect his investment?  At least the people around Kiran - Sunil and Kiran's brother and sister-in-law (Anupam Kher and Tanvi Azmi) - take seriously the threat posed by her stalker, which is more support than Madhuri Dixit's character gets in Anjaam. But still, what's a woman to do who doesn't have a Sunny Deol hovering protectively just around the corner? 

* I seem to recall this device used in another movie as well - did Salman Khan project an image of Preity Zinta in his wall in Jaan-e-mann?  As I recall it wasn't intended as a symbol of psychopathy there, but perhaps it should have been.

 

 

Julie (1975)

Dir. K.S. Sethumadhavan

Stories about minority communities can be engaging, especially when told with delicacy.  Older movies like Pestonjee, about the grim, lonely side of life in a Parsi community, or the much lighter Baton Baton Mein's peek into a pair of Christian families, have a memorable charm and sympathy. More recently, Homi Adajania turned a darkly satirical lens on Parsis in Being Cyrus and Goan Christians in Finding Fanny.  The 1970s hit Julie focuses on another minority community, the Anglo-Indian, and while it portrays some of their particular concerns, the drama of its titular character and the film's ultimate message are both more patently universal. 

The most interesting character in Julie is Julie's mother, Margaret (Nadira), the stern matriarch of the teenage girl's family.  Like many a Nadira character, Margaret is snappish, quick to anger, and paralyzingly conscious of her image and the regard of others.  But there are nuances to this presentation that make Margaret less cartoonish than she might be.  When she boasts to family friend about her English father, or her son in Delhi who sends home the finest imported goods, one might roll one's eyes.  But the discomfort with which she changes the subject when the friend asks about her mother is both pathetic and sympathetic, and lends complexity to Margaret's contempt for India and Indianness, and her obsession with things foreign.  Margaret feels rejected and abused by a thankless Indian society; her bitterness and the constant westward cast of her gaze are put in that perspective. 

Too, Margaret bears responsibility for her several children (including a tween daughter played by Sridevi as a child artiste), while contending with a less than responsible husband, Morris (Om Prakash, as broadly comic and reliably goofy as ever).  Morris embodies the filmi stereotype of Christian as good-natured drunk.  (Margaret, too, drinks quite a lot, though it seems with less abandon than Morris.  In a disturbing family dinner scene, Margaret and Morris both pressure young Julie to take a drink for herself, which she eventually does to please them, despite her own protestations.) As a railroad engineer, Morris is often away from home, and while is it to Margaret's endless frustration that he tends to squander his earnings, he spends on attempts to please his family at least as much as he spends on whiskey.  Morris perceives Margaret's desire for a finer life, believes she deserves it, and wants to deliver it to her; he blows the family's savings on the down payment on a car - foreign, of course, as Margaret would have it no other way. And so there is a great deal of affection in this family, not just between Morris and the children on whom he dotes (especially Julie), but even, in a complex way, between Morris and Margaret, despite her nagging disapproval.  The film presents this dynamic sensitively, allowing for nuance in personal relationships. The marriage of Margaret and Morris is neither a smooth ride in which love conquers all, nor a withered husk in which no tenderness remains.  The natural complexity lends some dimension to the stereotypes that Morris and Margaret instantiate.

"Get the bottle, man!" That is Sridevi, on the right, and she doesn't look very happy about it.

As for Julie herself (Laxmi, the same actor who starred in the Malayalam film of which Julie is a near scene-for-scene remake), like too many young women, Julie is surrounded by males who manhandle and objectify her to varying degrees.  A local shopkeeper paws at her while she picks up groceries for Margaret; because this man is played by Rajendranath I have the disturbing feeling these scenes are meant to play for comedy, but there is nothing at all funny about them.  The family friend, Mr. Misra, leers repulsively at Julie in the he beginning of the film and, toward the end, attempts to buy sex from her when she asks him for a job at his firm.  A boy in Julie's own Anglo-Indian community, Richard (Jalal Agha), gives her rides to school on his motorcycle, and clearly feels that this grants him possession, though Julie equally clearly rejects him as anything other than a friend.  Even the young man Julie likes, Shashi (Vikram) leers at her bare legs - those Christian girls dress so much more immodestly than their Hindu peers - and eventually seduces her into his bed (though in fairness to Shashi, despite Julie's initial hesitation, the sex appears joyfully consensual).

  

Julie remains demurely wrapped in a blanket, but a clear shot of the girlie magazines lying open on Shashi's bed leaves nothing to the imagination. 

The troubles that Julie endures - falling in love with a boy from outside her community, the disapproval of both her overbearing mother and his, a pregnancy that must be concealed lest her entire family be irreparably tarnished - are hardly unique to the Anglo-Indian experience.  Indeed many an Indian film has shown young women of many religions and social classes suffering in this way. And perhaps this very universality is the message of Julie. Margaret hates and resents mainstream Indians, believing that they have marginalized and stigmatized her community. And Shashi's mother (Achala Sachdev) is comically paranoid of Christians; Shashi and his father, Bhattacharya (Utpal Dutt at his most avuncular), openly mock her contemptuous distrust of Julie and her family.  The resolution of this inter-community tension is embodied in the child of Julie and Shashi's mixed and supposedly shameful union. In the end, it is Bhattacharya's voice of reason persuading both bitter, suspicious mothers that love is big enough to bridge differences between religions and communities. It's hard to imagine a more ecumenical conclusion than that.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015)

Dir. Kabir Khan

Salman Khan is certainly a subject of much controversy, what with blackbuck hunting, deadly driving, and rumored physical abuse of former lovers.  But he is also a sort of Teflon superstar; the controversies don't stick, at least not enough to tarnish the love of his legions of devoted fans, nor enough to bite into the bottom line.  I've acknowledged before that I have an incongruous soft spot for him - for his onscreen persona, I mean, which belies with teddy-bear sweetness all the self-absorption and violence of the trouble he's gotten himself into off screen.  And in what the cynical will surely see as a calculated masterstroke of public relations, his titular character in Bajrangi Bhaijaan is nothing if not the apotheosis of Khan's childlike, gentle giant avatar that, despite myself, I do find quite appealing.  

If you can't bring yourself to watch Salman Khan films because of one or the other rotten thing he's likely done, I won't argue with you about it - it's a reasonable position to take, and I won't begrudge it or judge it or attempt any argument in his favor.  But I also advise you not to read any further, because I have nothing more to say about the matter. I have only squeeing delight at the lovable fun that is every minute of Bajrangi Bhaijaan.  It is a genuinely entertaining film.(*) 

Among its pleasures is a soundtrack that runs the gamut from a couple of terrific traditional qawwalis to a chicken song danced by Khan and Kareena Kapoor; a satisfying fight scene in a brothel that is sufficiently stylized (and bloodless) and crafted with a touch of humor as to have the flavor of a throwback to 70s masala; and a mute little girl with the cutest smile you've seen in the movies since maybe Jugal Hansraj in Masoom.  That's right, Salman Khan, the big lug, gets his heart strings pulled by an adorable little moppet, and so do we: Bajrangi Bhaijaan is about as emotionally manipulative a narrative as you'll ever see.  But it's no criticism to call this out.  Most films are emotionally manipulative, in the sense that they aim to make you feel something, and use craft to varying degrees to achieve that end.  Bajrangi Bhaijaan makes no pretense about being emotionally manipulative, and the manipulation itself is so satisfying that submitting to it is a pleasure.  

Indeed, Bajrangi Bhaijaan is a most Rajkumar-Hirani-esque movie, with its capacity to entertain with cleverly crafted humor while preaching life lessons that ought to be obvious but are somehow charming and leave you grinning like a dope the whole time.  It posits a fantastical sort of world, in which innocence is protected and cherished rather than taken advantage of.  In this world, love conquers prejudice and even the dourest doubter can be won over just by the desire to put wrongs to right.  The title character (whose name is actually Pawan) is Salman Khan's most bhola-bhala incarnation ever, so committed to honesty that he blurts out all kinds of uncomfortable truths - even the little girl, Shahida (Harshaali Malhotra), is sometimes exasperated by his complete lack of self-preservation instinct.  (She acquires an adorable gesture with which she expresses this exasperation, a face-palm followed by extending the hand in helpless questioning.)  Yet somehow, Pawan's open-faced earnestness makes people want to help him in all kinds of improbable ways.  In the world of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Pawan succeeds not by guile, but by utter guilelessness.   

When Pawan meets Shahida, he doesn't know she is a Muslim, or from Pakistan.  He takes her for a Brahmin because, he says, she is fair-skinned; underlying this is his assumption that his beloved Bajrang Bali wouldn't spark such an emotional connection in him to one not of his caste and community.  This bias is not presented as an angry or hateful one, but rather a product of Pawan's naivete. (Contrast the blustery spouting of the same prejudices by Pawan's soon-to-be father-in-law, in whom it is wholly unsympathetic.) It is a slow process of correction by which Pawan comes to see the truth about Shahida. Pawan is stunned to find Shahida eating meat, but he rationalizes this discovery by concluding that she must be a Kshatriya - not Brahmin, but still sufficiently savarna as to not be too different from his sphere.  And after he recovers from his initial shock, he and Rasika (Kareena Kapoor) take her to a restaurant that serves chicken a hundred ways, and sing a whole delightful song to her about it.  Later, to Pawan's horror, Shahida trots off into a mosque, and finally the truth comes out when she commits the most egregious blasphemy of all: rooting for the wrong side in the India v. Pakistan cricket match.  (She is, after all, named for Shahid Afridi.)  And so Pawan's prejudices, and the path he takes to overcome them, are presented lovingly, as the opening of a heart that is already more open than one might have thought possible. Indeed, when Rasika finally makes explicit the implicit message here - that casteist and communal prejudices are stupid - she tells him that she wouldn't expect that great big heart she fell in love with could ever harbor such small-minded notions.  

But the real reason that Pawan can adjust his worldview to make room for Shahida is because by the time he figures out her origins he is completely in love with her.  And so are we.  Shahida looks out at the world through saucer-sized eyes, and flashes a mischeivous, radiant smile delicious enough to upstage the high-wattage star power that mills around her.  I would say that she is the true delight of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, but that would undersell the other terrific performances in the film, like Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Chand Nawab, a two-bit TV reporter  in Pakistan (think the "Danka TV" guys from Tere Bin Laden) who, like many others in the film, is won over by Pawan's purity of heart and joins his quest to reunite Shahida with her family.  Nawab, too, is happy to join in the movie's fantasy world, a respite from our much harsher, more cynical world.  

And then there is Salman Khan, delivering all this innocence joyfully, which makes him charming to watch when his character is happy, makes you feel like an indulgent older relative when he's stupid, and wrenches you when that innocence is taken advantage of.  It may be a calculated move on his part, shielding himself with an adorable little girl the way a criminal uses a hostage.  But it is a sweet, sweet movie, and its messages of love and unity are simple and pleasant.  It is a lot easier to watch the movie and let it do its magic than to think too hard about whether doing so is a kind of complicity in Salman Khan's misdeeds.  And on a sweltering July afternoon, I'm happy to take the easier path. 

(*) I still can't get my head around the fact that this gentle, delightful story was written by the same screenwriter responsible for the bombastic, unappealing heroics of Baahubali.

Baahubali (2015)

Dir. S.S. Rajamouli

When I first started watching Hindi movies, ten years ago, it took me a while to adjust to its storytelling idioms.  Its styles, archetypes, and antecedents were all unfamiliar to me.  With respect to the masala films of the 70s, some of which I watched quite early on in my studies, I have called this learning process "surrendering to the aesthetic."  But the process applies beyond masala, as the same narrative traditions that inform masala storytelling also influence other types of films.  

Obviously, Southern films draw on their own set of narrative traditions, their own idioms and archetypes. These are not entirely disjoint from those of Hindi films, but are nevertheless different. And I think at least a part of why the very evident craft of Baahubali is wasted on me is that I don't have sufficient familiarity with them to fully surrender to its aesthetic.  

I don't mean the visual aesthetic; the visuals of Baahubali are undeniably breathtaking, especially the towering and splendid waterfall scenes early on in the film.  The sweeping renderings of the palace complex where much of the film takes place are grand and impressive, of enormous scale and spectacle.  What takes adjustment for me is the narrative aesthetic of Baahubali, not the visual.  

The film's title character has two incarnations, both played by a curly-locked, barrel-chested, golden-smiled Prabhas: Shivu, a gentle giant of a young man who lives at the base of the waterfall and dreams of reaching its summit, and in flashback, as Shivu's biological father, a warrior prince of the mountain kingdom that Shivu eventually finds there.  In either avatar, Baahubali is a flawless superhero, spending most of the film Heroing Around Heroically.  

There is a gulf between the ordinary suspension of disbelief that movies require, and the complete dispensing with any nominal ties to physical reality that happens in a movie where a single man can support the weight of a hundred-foot-tall solid-gold statue.  Baahubali's demi-divine feats surely have a mythological resonance, drawn from classical epic episodes.  When Shivu, falling from a cliff, fires a precise, improbable arrow at a small stump of a tree, it recollects Arjun's feat of marksmanship at Draupadi's swayamvar.  Baahubali's superhuman strength recalls that of Bheema in the Mahabharata, or of Hanuman.  Perhaps it is this cultural fabric that lends appeal and entertainment value to a character like Baahubali and his extra-physical exploits, and makes them a hallmark of a certain South Indian cinematic style.

If all of this sounds very intellectual, it is.  There is yet a lot for me to learn from watching movies like Baahubali, but there is more of intellectual pleasure in it than emotional engagement. Superheroes bore me.  Baahubali is so powerful that nothing much challenges him. Throw one enemy or four or twenty at him, he will overcome them with identical violence.  And as if his physical strength isn't superhuman enough, he is so relentlessly good that he never makes mistakes, either tactically or morally.  His every decision is noble, his every word is truthful, his every obligation is honored. That the narrative centralizes on such a preternaturally gifted - and hence, to me, preternaturally dull - character just highlights the ways in which I do not have the right cultural calibration to be enthralled by a movie such as Baahubali.  

The warrior with whom Shivu falls in love, Avantika (Tamannah) begins with more narrative potential, but Baahubali, frustratingly, quashes it in short order.  Avantika is a serious badass; she lives with a band of rebel warriors, dedicated to rescuing the queen who has been held in captive humiliation for a quarter century by the usurper of Baahubali's throne. And while this mission drives Avantika, she also shows some hints of longing, or at least wondering, whether there is more to life.  The film assigns an infuriating interpretation to this longing:  As Shivu divines and then imposes on Avantika, all this fierce warrior girl really wants is to be pretty, adorn herself with makeup and jewelry, and twirl about in diaphanous skirts.  And as Shivu tears off Avantika's warrior clothes and decorates her to his liking, Avantika's indignation melts into desire, invoking that timeless idea that a woman's objection to being tossed about and disrobed is really just an invitation. 

This is not merely a matter of balancing Avantika's warrior impulse with something more socially feminine; rather, the film is rather literal in declaring the warrior persona a mask, and the soft-and-pretty persona Avantika's "true self", and the only expression of her womanhood that could truly satisfy her.  This disrespect for Avantika's drive culminates in Shivu's unilateral usurpation of her mission.  Though Shivu admits he knows nothing about the quest for which Avantika has trained her whole life, he announces that he will save the queen for her, and she need not worry her pretty little head about it any longer.  Shivu doesn't offer to join Avantika's quest; rather, he shoves her aside and takes her place in it.  In short, Avantika exists as a device, merely to give purpose to the hero's superhuman masculinity. It's Shivu's job to Be The Hero, and Avantika's job, as a woman, to supply him opportunities for heroism.  And so her own opportunity for heroism becomes his to claim away from her.  

It was somewhere around here that I tweeted, "This is all so wasted on me."  But I am not completely without capacity to be entertained by spectacle, and there are parts of the film that I do find quite enjoyable.  The early sequences with the backdrop of the massive waterfall are spectacular.  And the sequence in which the young barrel-chested hero hoists the shivlingam and trudges it across the rapids and down the slope is delightful. He does this to save his beloved mother a thousand and one treacherous trips to the Shiva shrine and back, as she prays for his safety.  Te sequence is, of course, an illustration of Shivu's superhuman strength - the shivlingam presumably weighs several tons. But it is also a clever way to show the young man's love for his mother, such a staple quality of Indian heroes that a new and sweet way to demonstrate it is always welcome.  More than that, it reveals a streak of playfulness and even irreverence in the strong-armed one, and is one of the more sparkling moments of character that he gets in the film, as contrasted with superheroic heroism.  

There are other characters who, unburdened by a shivlingam's weight in heroic requirements, get to have more character throughout, and these are enjoyable as well.  The bodyguard-armsmaster-slave Kattappa (Sathyaraj) is the film's most interesting character, with his ever-shifting obligations yet never-wavering loyalty. (That the film's cliffhanger centers on him may be enough for me to watch the sequel, despite being underwhelmed by this first installment.) He is introduced in a delightfully filmi encounter with a Pathan arms dealer, who, having challenged Kattappa to a duel and been defeated at it, becomes his friend for life, Sher Khan style.  

The other women who, like Avantika, provide heroic opportunities for our uber-man are also fun to watch, despite their ancillary standing.  The captive queen Devasena (Anushka) constantly sports a mad expression of defiance that is delightfully over-the-top.  And the previous queen Sivagami (Ramya Krishnan), the adoptive mother of the warrior-prince version of Baahubali, is magnificently fierce, making her statecraft decisions in a rational, considered manner, yet not shrinking from violence when it is necessary. When Sivagami draws a knife and cuts and armed man's throat with one hand while cradling a tiny baby with the other, it is every bit as improbable as any of Baahubali's feats.  Yet it is tremendously more satisfying, somehow, both for its emotion and for what it conveys about Sivagami, as a character and as an archetype. 

And so there are points of engagement for me that prick through the otherwise stifling fabric of this movie, woven as it is with a warp of Baahubali's relentless flawlessness and a weft of interminable melee and battle scenes.  (I feel caught up in one of Baahubali's clever tentcloth-and-catapult-stone contrivances, before he sets it on fire.)  I know this is the stuff of entertaining movies for lots of folks but I just find the endless fight scenes oppressive.  I can't bear the violence for its own sake, and the film makes a crucial error in failing to assign any narrative importance to the enemy, the Kalakeyas, apart from being convenient landing points for maces and spears.  Even leaving aside the racist caricatures that they embody, the Kalakeyas are an unforgivably lazy plot device, an enemy manufactured from air when the film wants to provide a large-scale battle, rather than a foe woven organically into the backstory.  In a film that wants to be an epic there is room to give the battle some emotional heft, to create an enemy that matters in some way, but Baahubali cannot be bothered with this, and it's both a wasted opportunity, and an insult to the audience.  

To pass the time in the insufferable final half hour of the film, I forced myself to ponder the impressive technical craft that must have gone in to creating these battle scenes.  They are surely a marvel, especially the sweeping long shots with tens of thousands of soldiers.  Narratively, though, they are unbearably dull.  The story screeches to a halt while swords clash, bones crunch, blood spurts. How many blackfaced enemy skulls must we watch getting clocked with maces, before we get the point?   

Given the huge success of Baahubali, the vast number of people of many perspectives and backgrounds who are enthralled by its scope and story, I do feel I've missed the boat, in that the best enjoyment I have got from it came not from watching it, but from pondering why it's so crushingly dull for me and so brilliantly compelling for others.  There are certain films I wouldn't watch if they weren't Indian, and Baahubali is one of these.  The corollary is that what interests me about Baahubali is primarily what is especially Indian about it.  And so I don't regret having seen it, for what it's given me to think about.