Lounge
How Bhansali elevates the first encounter
Summary
An excerpt from a new book on the Hindi director considers the importance of first sightings in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema
In Bhansali’s films, when lovers lay eyes on each other for the first time, or when the audience lays eyes on the characters, they are energized into being, a moment of grace. That, for him, is love.
Destiny is involved. When you are granted darshan, it is as though all of your life was meandering towards this very moment—a sacred, irresistible cliche. It is the romantic bulwark against any existential fugue that frustrates one’s purpose in life.
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Love at first sight liberally peppers Bhansali’s filmography. When Raj (Salman Khan) lays eyes on Annie (Manisha Koirala) in Khamoshi: The Musical for the first time, it is his animated rite of passage into the film. In Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, it is the fixed gaze of Nandini (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) on Sameer (Salman Khan) when they first sight each other, a chandelier with candles swaying in between them, creating this ephemeral barrier between the two strangers who would, over the course of the next hour, be stained in each other’s reckless love. Similarly, there is Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) holding the gaze of Sakina (Sonam Kapoor) for the first time in Saawariya as she is running away from a drunk heckler; Ram (Ranveer Singh) fixated, hypnotized by Leela (Deepika Padukone) the first time their eyes cross paths in Ram-Leela amid a spray of Holi colours and a burst of bullets. Whether love at first sight is a human possibility, a biological lunge, or whether it is a mimetic aspiration we have inherited from cinema, it is an emotionally, erotically dense moment invoking, unrolling, predicting the intensity of the journey that the lovers will now chart.
This idea of darshan Bhansali takes to the logical, narrative, emotional, and erotic extreme in Padmaavat where Alauddin Khilji (Ranveer Singh), a brute, is willing to destroy a kingdom, deploy his army, devastate himself just to get a glimpse of Rani Padmavati (Deepika Padukone), whose unparalleled beauty he has only heard of; the things he does to merely get this darshan.
It makes sense, then, that in Devdas, Bhansali’s cinematographer Binod Pradhan doesn’t let us glimpse Paro immediately. We must grovel and wait. It is the sign of a devotee—an uneasy impatience, like a thronging crowd, early morning, waiting for the idol to be unveiled in temples. When we first hear her voice, reacting to her mother’s news, Pradhan shoots it from the top, as though god—Bhansali’s interpretation, not mine—is peering over this world pooling in the hued shadows of cut, coloured glass that make up the edifice of Paro’s house. Then a shot from the side, with the lamp and Paro’s arms in the foreground. Her friends—sakhis—attempt to blow this lamp, laughing at her longing, and failing to snuff it out. They begin to musically express this annoyance as an eyebrow knotting gesture. The lamp, like her desire, is headstrong, capable of, literally, braving fierce cloudbursts. It is only when the lightning ruptures the sky and the thunder breaks that we first see her face, illuminated in the sharp, ephemeral whiteness of that lightning, her metallic bindi reflecting that light as though it were lit from within, a magnesium circle burned hollow into her forehead. Her song begins. She is introduced through her perfumed, aching, gorgeous longing.
There are two other scenes with the cinematic force of an entry. When Devdas, as an adult, first meets Paro, for example. This is, technically, Devdas’ introduction scene; it is when we first see his face as an adult, first lay eyes on Shah Rukh Khan. But Bhansali stages it as a breathless moment for Paro, shy of seeing Devdas, running away with alta still wet on her feet staining the floor, a flowing yellow sari whose loose end she pulls and then tosses over her shoulder as she gallops through corridors lined by partitions made from those very cut coloured glasses. For Bhansali, it is more important for us to see Paro as Devdas wants to than to see Devdas. Or perhaps, the joy of seeing Devdas has now been sublimated into the joy of seeing Devdas’ love—an effacing of the self, expressed through the grammar of cinema.
Paro ends up, panting, on a bed, and uses the white sheet to shoo a bee that has disturbed her reverie. A choreography with thick, milk-white cloth ensues and it is in the fluster of this that we first see Devdas. Paro refuses to show her face to him. She is stretching that desperate moment waiting for darshan—of him for her, of her for him.
When she does show him her face, later, under the creaming moonlight, she makes her third, forceful, cinematic entrance. This scene serves as a masterclass in creating dynamism through stillness. When Bhansali wants to show time passing, the coloured shadows of the glass keep shifting—because of light shifting—as Devdas and Paro are stationary.... Devdas is in thrall of Paro’s face which is resting, in sleep. The camera moves vertically such that the focus remains on her face, and from behind them, the moon emerges into frame.
Even in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, being introduced to Nandini is like being introduced to a life force; excess distilled. Her walking on the rann, with the kandeel, a fluttering tinsel lantern crackling the soundscape, her lehenga with patches of metallic asparagus green and wine-drunk maroon, shimmering in the sun creating a thick watery haze of a mirage over which she is floating. A chakda comes along and she leaps onto it. If you pause your gaze, luring it towards the lehenga, you can see strains of peacock blue as the wind ripples through it and the sun spits its light. Through a frenzied song and dance around a game of pitthu—or seven stones, involving a ball and a pile of flat stones—she is allowed to bend into choreography, jumping, leaping, twisting her hips this way and that, in the spare, heat-domed Gujarati desert. It is a gagging celebration of her beauty.
Excerpted with permission from ‘On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’ by Prathyush Parasuraman, published by Penguin Random House India.
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