Ram Leela Review :

A bloody, grand, color-splashed spin on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet features Romeo in the adult film retail business and Juliet prepared to jump him at any available opportunity.


As with every film director Sanjay Leela Bhansali directs (with the exception of “Khamoshi – The Musical”), a few aspects are mandatory: big sprawling sets, a drastic idiosyncratic color palette, and key players engaged by consistent conflict or commotion – which in the case of “Ram-Leela” is both.
There’s too much to love here, even if by the end one ends up being irked by a bulk of it.

Inspired from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “Ram-Leela” (aka. “Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram Leela”) opens on a small Gujrati town one would be hard pressed to find on a map or Google Earth. The place is a perpetual, easy going limbo between the old and the new world, where everyone is garbed in traditional clothes, ride Ambassadors and use gaudy, blinking cell phones (thank goodness there’s no product placement in Mr. Bhansali’s films); despite being in what I presume to be our times, there is nary a pant-shirt in sight.

The town is divided by five hundred year old rivals: the Rajadis and Saneras – two local gangs who rarely do anything nasty (I didn’t see one kidnapping, assassination or any other misdeed from anyone). The reasons behind their grudge is never fleshed out, but whatever it is, I can guess that it will be as single dimensioned and soft-cored as the immediate physical attraction between Ram and Leela.

Ram played by Ranveer Singh, the local “Romeo” (the roadside kind, with a tinge of Disney’s Aladdin) with a sweet trimmed physique and a lack of body-hair, is from the Rajadis. The Saneras “Juliet” is Deepika Padukone’s Leela, whose natural beauty scarcely measures up to her primed carnal sense (lips are locked whenever the two hone in on each other).

Mr. Bhansali’s film has a disarming flair for theatricality, from the word go: in his town gun stalls are set-up like grocery stands and ammunition is stored in everything from achaar jars, flour drums and front bonnets of rusty cars.

A still from movie, 'Ramleela'. - Courtesy Photo
A still from movie, 'Ramleela'. - Courtesy Photo
Notwithstanding the open kill-or-be-killed agreement between the two clans, no one is critically hurt until “Ram-Leela’s” intermission. By then the narrative starts to bite off too much, escalating the lingering conflict into a lackluster, hyperbolic affair. The contrast is disorienting, because it moves away from “Ram-Leela’s” nimble and entertaining pre-intermission story layout.

Mr. Singh as Ram is an immediately like-able presence – a winking, nudging, overconfident oddball who oozes charisma, and isn’t really the image of the town bad boy he advertises himself up to be (he’s also the family black sheep, choosing instead to run an adult video retail business, rather than be in the “family business”). Ms. Padukone’s Leela shares Ram’s deeper sense of character, vulnerability and richness – including their shared eagerness to run away at any given moment.

A still from movie, 'Ramleela'. - Courtesy Photo
A still from movie, 'Ramleela'. - Courtesy Photo
The two, with their raw eroticism make a scorching-hot on-screen couple, whose versatility on the dance floor includes everything from impromptu jiggy body-moves to Garba. The film’s spiffily orchestrated soundtrack is another handiwork of Mr. Bhansali’s talent (“Nagada Sung” by Shreya Ghoshal, Osman Mir, “Tattad Tattad” and “Ishqyaun Dhishqyaun” by Aditya Narayan are dandy foot-tapping numbers).

Mr. Bhansali, who always writes grounded characters, fills the space between Ram and Leela, with Ba (Supriya Pathak) Leela’s mother and her clan’s godmother, Raseela (Richa Chadda) Leela’s sister in law, and Bhavani (Gulshan Devaiah), her cousin and the film’s juvenile villain. On Ram’s side only his brother, played by Abhimanyu Singh is given a little elbow room in an already overcrowded screen-space (or maybe, that’s just the production design making things look jam-packed).

There is sumptuousness in Mr. Bhansali’s frames, as he makes “Ram-Leela” a deliberate cross-breed between “Hum Dil De Chukay Sanam” and “Devdas”. If the cinematic maven would have stuck to the former, the film’s attraction wouldn’t only have to rely on superficial physical lure, and later, the tendency to go bloody boom. It would have simply been an instant classic.

Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Produced by Mr. Bhansali, Chetan Deolekar, Kishore Lulla and Sandeep Singh. Written by Mr. Bhansali, Garima and Siddharth (based on Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare); Cinematography by Ravi Varman; Editing by Rajesh G. Pandey and Mr. Bhansali; Production Design by Wasiq Khan; Music by Mr. Bhansali.

Starring: Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Richa Chadda, Supriya Pathak, Sharad Kelkar, Gulshan Devaiah, Barkha Bisht, Abhimanyu Singh, Anshul Trivedi and Priyanka Chopra (special appearance in the song "Ram Chahe Leela") “Ram-Leela” is released by Eros. The film is rated A for unrelenting romance, eroticism and presumed high body count.

Gunday Movie Review :

Cast:Priyanka Chopra, Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor 
Director: Ali Abbas Zafar 
Writer: Ali Abbas Zafar 

SPOILERS AHEAD

The plot of Gunday kicks off from the violence that surrounded the creation of Bangladesh. But nobody expected the film be an illuminating history lesson about the subcontinent.
The snazzy pre-release teasers did however raise visions of a fast-paced, entertaining buddy flick set in the tumult of early 1970s Calcutta.

Sadly, Gunday delivers only on bits and pieces of that promise.

A large part of the story actually unfolds in the mid 1980s but the film makes a complete hash of the period details.

A glimpse of a hand-painted poster of Zanjeer is thrown in to establish 1973; a Disco Dancer number is played on the soundtrack to denote the passage of a decade; and a song sequence from Mr India is unspooled inside what is passed off as Esplanade’s Metro Cinema to indicate that we are in 1987.
But everything else – including the leading lady’s midriff-baring outfits and backless blouses that obviously belong to a later era of fashion – is a free for all.

And since it is Kolkata, the Hooghly and the Howrah Bridge are a constant presence, so are references to fish and football.

Gunday is smartly mounted and studded with a few lively song and dance routines. But the parts do not quite come together to create a gripping whole.

Written and directed by Ali Abbas Zafar, the film suffers in the end owing to slipshod editing and a hackneyed storyline that runs out of steam all too quickly.

Neither Ranveer Singh nor Arjun Kapoor is a finished article yet. So salvaging the half-baked script, despite their best efforts, is way beyond them.

Priyanka Chopra provides a few of the film’s brighter spots, but none of them is luminous enough to offset the relentlessly vacuous bluster of Gunday.
Irrfan Khan, in an extended guest appearance as a tough talking cop on the trail of a duo of young goons, towers head and shoulders above the rest of the cast. But that certainly isn’t a surprise.

In fact, Gunday springs no surprises at all.

The pivotal characters of the two Bangladesh War orphans are particularly flat.
The boys have seen the worst and they have good reason to be hugely aggrieved with how the world has treated them.

But neither emerges as a compelling flesh and blood embodiment of rebellion.
They are out-and-out criminals whose justifications for their crooked ways ring hollow.

No prizes for guessing that one is happy go lucky and loquacious, and that the other is the easy-to-provoke type.

The central conflict of their lives emanates from their sheer desperation to live down the past and shed their refugee status.

In the bargain, the two men break the law at will, indulging in gun-running, coal pilferage and illegal trade in anything that they can lay their hands on.

They repeatedly get into the crosshairs of a police officer, but the latter is unable to bring them to book in the absence of incontrovertible evidence.

Priyanka Chopra dons the guise of a cabaret dancer whose charm ensnares the two buddies to such an extent that they fall out with each other.

Unfortunately, the drama that ensues is painfully dreary.

Owing to the fact that the film pans out along largely predictable lines, one ceases to care either about who gets the girl or about the fate of the cocky policeman’s bid to outwit the over-confident outlaws.

The death knell of Gunday begins to ring loud and clear from pretty early on. It takes no time to reveal its true nature – it is merely an attractive shell that conceals an insipid core.

Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor flaunt chiseled pectorals and sing and dance with gusto.
Priyanka plays the coquette to perfection, but her character is never more than a cardboard cutout.

The eye candy on liberal display in Gunday isn’t buttressed with enough narrative energy.

It really is difficult to keep a two-and-a-half-hour film from losing its wheels when its engine room is bereft of the propellant of genuine inspiration.
Gunday is like the dusty minefields it is set in. Its loud explosions deliver loads of coal, but no trace of any diamonds.

It is certainly not the ideal date film on this Valentine’s Day weekend.