The one thing that strikes you about Prathyush Parasuraman’s book On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali is the detailing. Just as the auteur filmmaker would have carefully crafted each element of his films, Prathyush dissects threadbare every Bhansali film down to its dialogues, lyrics, music, scenes, characters, and plots in pursuit of the beauty inherent in them.

Visceral, not cerebral

Prathyush observes that while all Bhansali’s films are based on raw material that’s already available – medieval poetry, colonial literature, Russian short stories, Shakespeare, historical biographies, novels, and films already made; his interpretations of them are adulterous, never faithful, he doesn’t care for historical accuracy, adding characters and scenes to serve his autobiographical, aesthetic urges. In a sense, Bhansali doesn’t create new cinematic thoughts, just expands them, and presents them in a visually stunning manner.

A film must generally tell a story with a taut screenplay, meaningful dialogues and a well-defined world that doesn’t distract you from the story. But Bhansali doesn’t follow the standard template.In his films, form overtakes substance. Beauty matters in films, but in Bhansali films, only beauty matters. It’s the visceral over the cerebral. Can one then watch a beautiful film and find it boring?

Pratyush compares Bhansali’s treatment of beauty in his films like a stain on the shirt. It’s not as if the shirt doesn’t exist, it is that the attention is always directed to the stain. That’s why the impossibly horrific self-immolation sequence of Padmaavat comes across as a spectacle, as a gleaming image with which the film ends. That is Bhansali’s essential knack of elevating the scene beyond the story, of celebrating the beauty of the sacrifice rather than repelling at the horror of it.

On religion, Pratyush observes that while Manmohan Desai forcefully filled his films with characters from different religions to create a fictional secular tapestry that the country could feed off, Bhansali uses it largely to enhance the beauty of his world, like the Mona Lisa curtain in a Christian household, the use of gulaal in a Hindu festival and the arches and architecture of a Muslim house. He doesn’t strive for accuracy – Annie, the Christian character in Khamoshi, calls God ‘Khuda’, since it sits nicely in the lyrics of the song.

Nor does he care too much for history when he makes Bajirao’s first wife dance in celebration with his new companion, the Muslim Mastani. The fact that the two women never met doesn’t bother Bhansali, he’s excited by the beauty of that conflict and uses that to create cinematic spectacle. History, be damned.

Beauty in Love and Longing

Bhansali finds beauty in unrequited love. The half-fulfilled longing, the pathos of yearning, the suffering and the letting go of the lover, knowing that you can’t get him are common themes in his movies like Saawariya, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Ram-Leela, Devdas, Bajirao Mastani, Padmaavat, Guzaarish or Gangubai Kathiawadi.

In his retelling of Bimal Roy’s Devdas, which focused on suffering, Bhansali instead presents us the love, the possessiveness. The scene of Paro’s rejection by Devdas’s mother is absent in the older version, just a dialogue refers to it, but Bhansali turns that scene into an intense display of the rupture of dignity, the show of courage and the display of grace by Paro’s mother.

Pratyush says there is nothing aspirational about Bhansali’s cinema, no message or revelation. His characters are torn by life, so full of grief that you never want to emulate them.

Poverty in the Tale, not in the Telling

In Bhansali’s films, poverty is in the texts, not in the visuals. Characters living in the ghettos, prostitutes and courtesans living in the kothis, the graveyard dweller wear dresses designed by Manish Malhotra and Neeta Lulla. Bhansali’s arrival, at a time when India transitioned from the single screens to multiplexes at the turn of the century, perhaps, paved a way for a new representation of poverty, while filmmakers like Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra focused on showcasing modern India.

Pratyush says beauty is the opposite of knowledge in the sense that while knowledge makes us feel bigger, beauty makes the world feel bigger. Bhansali exploits all elements of beauty like shringar, adaab and nakhrato to take us into the worlds he creates. The very red Gujarati-ness of Ram Leela, the white Bengali-ness of Devdas, the saffron Marathi-ness of Bajirao Mastani, the blue dinginess of Saawariya, the silent Goan-ess of Khamoshi or the incapacitated urban-ess of Guzaarish.

One wonders why Pratyush didn’t get Bhansalis’ point of view for this book, it would have made it much richer. Access wouldn’t have been an issue for he works with Anupama Chopra, under whose husband Bhansali earned his music and direction chops, (Bhansali was the song director of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s films 1942, A Love Story and Parinda). Though Bhansali wouldn’t have approved of a book on beauty without a single visual.

It’s a gem of a book for anyone studying cinema.

Whether you have watched Bhansali’s films or not, this book will give you a terrific bird’s eye view of how Bhansali painstakingly uses beauty to craft his films. And why audiences love to lose themselves in the spectacle he creates, forgetting the shirt but remembering the stain!

The reviewer runs 91 Film Studios that produces, markets, and distributes feature films in regional languages.

About the book
  • ON BEAUTY: THE CINEMA OF SANJAY LEELA BHANSALI
  • Prathyush Parasurman
  • Penguin
  • 256 pages; ₹360

Find the book here.

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