Saawariya movie rating and review

Saawariya (2007) Movie Rating and Review :
When you go to watch Saawariya, you have to remember that all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players, who have no existence outside Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s gaint, lurid imagination.

Devdas was a warning. So was Black of Bhansali’s grand notion of cinema as garish sets. He had taken other liberties; the films were suspended in a sort of timelessness and freed from the rigid demands of a particular topography or history. These are also true of Saawariya, but with his latest essay Bhansali attempts to go where he has not tried to before. He tries to turn all his men and women into pure ideas.

No – he tries to turn them into poetry, by bathing them in a blue light, draping them in dreamy designer clothes and embellishing them with internationally-accepted Indian kitsch.

So once upon a time, into the main set of Saawariya, walks Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor), a penniless young tramp who wears his heart on his sleeve and his guitar on his shoulder – and is a throwback to the Raj Kapoor Awaara Persona. Raj is Bhansali’s idea of Pure Love.

He is a petty boy. He gets a job aa a singer at blue-tinged bar, where he befriends Gulabi (Rani Mukerji), the hard-nosed wise-cracking lady of pleasure fond of her drink and her English. Gulabi falls for Raj Immediately because of the sturdy innocence that radiates from him, as does his goffy smile, another of the actor’s grandpop’s legacies.

Here the blue-lit bridge is significant. On it waits a tall, graceful, Female figure in silhouette, in folds of black, stilled as if by the mystery of her own presence. She is Sakina (Sonam Kapoor), the daughter of an old aristocratic family that has fallen on bad times but hasn’t obviously run out of its stock of the finest embroidered clothes and chikan. She is obviously also from the minority community but cosmopolitan Bhansali will not do anything as gross as spell out the phrase “religious difference in his dainty world.

Now, to pull this storyline off and turn it into an enjoyable film requires a lively screenplay and dialogues, and most of all, a scene of humure, an intelligence that that would recognise the plot as a contrivance and treat it as such, as an opera, or as theatre, as Baz Luhrmann does in Moulin Rouge. But Bhansali, alas, lacks all of this.

There is not a single line from Raj to Sakina that is real funny – and when raj sledge-hammers his way into old Zohra Sehgal’s heart, it is pathetic, not tear-including. The only instance when Gulabji says disapprovingly about something: “I don’t likes!” The viewers share her sentiment – about many things.

The story is based on Dostoyevsky’s short story White Nights, which Bhansali acknowledges, but the film is also said to be heavily depended on Italian master Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film of the same name based on the same story, which is not acknowledged.

Ranbir is fine as a debutant, but he is burdened too much with the Kapoor name. Even the bar that he works at is named RK bar. Then there is the Shri 420 Raj Kapoor-Nargis umbrelia. And Ranbir’s towel-song? It is too little, too hyped. And he does it in the backdrop of curtains with knowing Mona Lisa eyes painted on them, while Ranbir himself winked and leers. Raj is not as innocent as he looks. Bhansali is a grandmaster of fakes.

Other credits? Sonam is petty and insipid. Sets are credited to Omung Kumar, whose brain is obviously as over-stimulated as Bhansali’s. The rest of the film is one boring choreography.
In any case, there is too much blue light. As a young viewer said:“Wise there was more of the towel sequence and less of mush. Then at least we could have called it a blue film.”

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