Guzaarish: High Falutin’ and Delusive
By Sanjeev Verma
Ordinarily, just his name is enough to put me off. Sanjay Leela Bhansali shares that privilege with Karan Johar. I find them bogus film-makers masquerading as auteurs. Auteurism is the theory of a film director as the ‘author’ of a film. Yes, cinema is a collaborative process but some of these film-makers have such a distinct style that they leave their unmistakable stamp on all their creations. There have been true auteurs in cinema; I can name a few straightaway: Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, Satyajit Ray, et al. But a film director who is barely competent masquerading as an auteur is truly bad news. Like these two gentlemen.
Pictorialism rather than poignancy marks SLB and KJ’s approach to cinema. The real tragedy is that their pictorialism is seriously flawed too. To be sure, there is always plenty that’s going on in their films—whether Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham or Black, or Guzaarish, the provocation for me to put pen to paper—but the vast images on the screen seem to emasculate the plot. Their films lack a fundamental dramatic sense. Good directors, and good writers for that matter, have a sharp instinct for how people relate to one another and consequently what they say.
In Guzaarish not only does what people are saying in the film sound false to the ear; after a while what we are seeing on the widescreen begin to seem false to the eye. A film director who can’t hold attention with either his narrative or his pictorialism is bogus. Bhansali seems less interested in the story than in giving the images a spiritual glow.
With his new film Bhansali is giving us not only auteur vibes but also pretending that the intensity of his film is such that he had to dispense with the services of a music composer. He has done the music for Guzaarish himself. The film has a faux operatic sound and feel but there isn’t a shred of originality in it. Much as I hated SLB’s earlier films Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas, I have to concede that Ismail Durbar’s music was magnificent. His earlier Khamoshi had some splendid music by Jatin-Lalit and even his worst detractors wouldn’t call the music of Saanwariya forgettable.
But in Guzaarish he loses his music mojo too. He may have this penchant for getting it right every time and I am sure he drives his production unit nuts as he mounts his sequences but the drama and the dialogue is so corny. We are meant to empathise deeply with Ethan Mascarenhas, the handsome quadriplegic played by Hrithik Roshan, but in the designer set pieces that our ‘auteur’ creates there is room only for things posh and pretty.
As the film enters his most elegiac phase, one scene finally—finally—succeeded in tugging at my heart-strings. The roof of the Gothic villa Ethan Mascarenhas lives in ruptures and drops of water plop on Ethan’s face. He’s a quadriplegic. Can’t move. He writhes. It’s bravura stuff for precisely 30 seconds as Roshan shows his resourcefulness as an actor. Then the moment passes and SLB’s hokeyness takes over. Ethan’s protégé is lying slumped in a chair somewhere in that sprawling house and can’t hear the cries for help, while his mother has also shut her eyes—forever. So, the hero suffers through the night and it is only in the morning that his comely nurse rescues him.
Guzaarish is Bhansali belting out the same note on the piano for two hours and seven minutes. It’s just exasperating. The film finds you asking questions. Far too many questions:
Ordinarily, just his name is enough to put me off. Sanjay Leela Bhansali shares that privilege with Karan Johar. I find them bogus film-makers masquerading as auteurs. Auteurism is the theory of a film director as the ‘author’ of a film. Yes, cinema is a collaborative process but some of these film-makers have such a distinct style that they leave their unmistakable stamp on all their creations. There have been true auteurs in cinema; I can name a few straightaway: Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, Satyajit Ray, et al. But a film director who is barely competent masquerading as an auteur is truly bad news. Like these two gentlemen.
Pictorialism rather than poignancy marks SLB and KJ’s approach to cinema. The real tragedy is that their pictorialism is seriously flawed too. To be sure, there is always plenty that’s going on in their films—whether Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham or Black, or Guzaarish, the provocation for me to put pen to paper—but the vast images on the screen seem to emasculate the plot. Their films lack a fundamental dramatic sense. Good directors, and good writers for that matter, have a sharp instinct for how people relate to one another and consequently what they say.
In Guzaarish not only does what people are saying in the film sound false to the ear; after a while what we are seeing on the widescreen begin to seem false to the eye. A film director who can’t hold attention with either his narrative or his pictorialism is bogus. Bhansali seems less interested in the story than in giving the images a spiritual glow.
With his new film Bhansali is giving us not only auteur vibes but also pretending that the intensity of his film is such that he had to dispense with the services of a music composer. He has done the music for Guzaarish himself. The film has a faux operatic sound and feel but there isn’t a shred of originality in it. Much as I hated SLB’s earlier films Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas, I have to concede that Ismail Durbar’s music was magnificent. His earlier Khamoshi had some splendid music by Jatin-Lalit and even his worst detractors wouldn’t call the music of Saanwariya forgettable.
But in Guzaarish he loses his music mojo too. He may have this penchant for getting it right every time and I am sure he drives his production unit nuts as he mounts his sequences but the drama and the dialogue is so corny. We are meant to empathise deeply with Ethan Mascarenhas, the handsome quadriplegic played by Hrithik Roshan, but in the designer set pieces that our ‘auteur’ creates there is room only for things posh and pretty.
As the film enters his most elegiac phase, one scene finally—finally—succeeded in tugging at my heart-strings. The roof of the Gothic villa Ethan Mascarenhas lives in ruptures and drops of water plop on Ethan’s face. He’s a quadriplegic. Can’t move. He writhes. It’s bravura stuff for precisely 30 seconds as Roshan shows his resourcefulness as an actor. Then the moment passes and SLB’s hokeyness takes over. Ethan’s protégé is lying slumped in a chair somewhere in that sprawling house and can’t hear the cries for help, while his mother has also shut her eyes—forever. So, the hero suffers through the night and it is only in the morning that his comely nurse rescues him.
Guzaarish is Bhansali belting out the same note on the piano for two hours and seven minutes. It’s just exasperating. The film finds you asking questions. Far too many questions:
- Why does this director filch ideas from European films so shamelessly?
- Why does he use so much English in the film? Doesn’t that alienate a majority of Indian filmgoers?
- Why do so many characters in the film—examples: mommy dear who appears as suddenly as she disappears and the nurse’s abusive husband—flit in and out inexplicably?
- Why is there a song in the film with trite lyrics like Sau gram zindagi?
- Why does SLB shoot Ethan’s villa like the Norman Bates house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho? (Mascarenhas’ villa stands starkly against the overcast sky, dark and foreboding.)
- And, hey, why on earth did Bhansali’s acting scouts dredge up the insufferable Suhel Seth from the suburbs of Delhi to play a doctor in the film? That is unforgivable.
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