Rating : 4/5
An exotic existential exultation of exuberant emotional exaltation
Introduction
Viewing Sanjay Leela Bansali’s Saawariya is like watching Ludwig van Beethoven composing music, William Shakespeare writing poetry, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti sculpting a David, Leonardo de Vinci painting the Mona Lisa and Anna Pavlovna Pavlova doing a pirouette of an extravagant ballet.
Saawariya is an exhilarating cinematic experience. The film, an avant-garde audio visual art of exceptional brilliance, transports you into a misty aura of compulsive catharsis, where the observer and the observed transform into a transcendental unified entity.
Saawariya is Sanjay Leela Bansali’s tribute to Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and the great architect of Moghul-e-Azam. Saawariya is a sensitive celluloid exposition of humane sensitivity.
Taking Fyodor Dostoevsky’s minuscule play “White Nights“, Bhansali has built huge but unimposing emotions classified by dollops of awe-inspiring studio-erected architecture that represents feelings rather than physical forms.
Synopsis
It is a story of an entity of non-entities. Raj(Ranbir Kapoor), resembling Raj Kapoor’s persona, is like a Katti Pathang . He is someone in search of himself or may be, he is in search of something, he never knew about. It is the feeling of love. Or is it something else? It is said that once you love life, you will know what loving is all about.
The protagonist of Saawariya is a blithe spirit, who meets Shakira(Sonam Kapoor). She is waiting for her first love(Salman Khan) to return. Will Raj remain with unrequited love? Or will he embody himself with his lovely lady? To know the answer, you have to go through the absorbing experience of watching Saawariya.
Saawariya is a salubrious saga of two adolescents coming disturbingly close and disastrously falling apart. There is then Gulabji(Rani Mukherjee), who inspires and motivates the hero to go on loving, regardless.
Performances
Ranbir Kapoor gives an exhilarating performance. Then comes Sonam Kapoor. She is simply fantabulous. Did someone say thespian genes are mutating? For the first time in his filmi career, Salman Khan communicates with his eyes and facial muscles. Rani Mukherjee, as a split personality of body-hire occupation and mindful of never to receive love, excels in every thing she does. Are there any other actors?
You are so immersed with the hero and heroine, the agony of their ecstasy and the ecstasy of their agony, that you do not want to see anyone in the picturesque frames. Those who are there simply carry forward the dreamy narration.
Technical
Sanjay Leela Bansali gives a masterpiece of soulful screenplay. As usual, he navigates the sublime oceans of spectacular, yet subdued, tsunamis of extravaganza, Talk about cinematic excellence in its absolute entirety. You have it, in an opulent abundance. The disarming delicacy with which art directors Omang and Vinita Kumar and cinematographer Ravi Chandran have built the blue foundations of the film’s ravishingly romantic imagination lifts Dostoevsky’s play to the sphere of poetry.
Monty Sharma, incidentally a nephew of Pyarelal, had given an astounding score. The DTS mix is something that evokes the extremity of audio pleasure, if there is one.
Judgement
Thank you, Sanjay Leela Bansali, you have given us the ultimate cinematic experience. May your tribe of movie makers live forever.
Saawariya is one film, you don’t want to miss. This is one movie, worth buying tickets in Black, to watch.
– Deen Kumar
