Grandiose but lacks souls

‘Baahubali - The Beginning’ is perceived more as a Rajamouli film than a Prabhas one and this pleasant shift from hero-centric films to a director is welcome. Paradoxically, it happens with a film that celebrates heroics of a level hitherto not witnessed. Loiter on any road in the city, initiate any discussion, partake in any conversation and the frenzy generated for the film is all too obvious.

Fireworks outside the many theatres, the dust and din, the moolah the film is likely to generate – all tell a tale of their own. Rarely has the excitement captured the audience like this, even before the first reel rolled out! The film is contextually a milestone and for other reasons could be an archival pride.

The expectations match the promise of grandeur that Raj Kapoor carried with ‘Mera Naam Joker’ or Yash Chopra with ‘Silsila’. Surely Rajamouli would like the similarities to end there. The film is a full-throated celebration of grandeur. Sixty nanoseconds into it you know that this is about magnificence, about the traditional battle between good and evil – albeit in a period.

The first few moments sets the trend and announces that the only way you are to deal with the next two-and-a-half hours of your life is to completely suspend reasoning and be on a ride of unbelievable stunts and physics defying heroics unimagined in Tollywood (though it is still no match to classics like Ben Hur).

The victim of a vicious arrow – Sivagami (Ramya Krishna) – is on the run with an infant in her hands. She is committed to save the baby but is challenged by nature’s fury. The child, Sivudu, grows up in a hilly area ignorant of his lineage. His foster mother (Rohini) is afraid to let him return to the world he came from.

Agile and crazy, Sivudu (Prabhas), is our version of Sylvester Stallone. In no time, it is going to be revealed that he is imagination gone haywire – he is Phantom, Spiderman, Superman, Rajinikanth and all the Khans rolled in one! And enough beef to accommodate them too! As you fall in love with the locales (VFX), he falls in love with Avantika (Tamannaah) as surreal as the locales.

Love blooms amidst sword fights, fantasy forests, torrential waterfalls and rocky terrain. However, Avantika is part of a revolutionary group that is planning to ‘bring back’ Devasena (Anushka). Sivudu has a sneak preview of the revolt and pledges his support to his love. After many reels of waterfalls and fountains, scuba tattoos and sub-aerial graffiti, the conflict is brewing to erupt.

Sivagami is a tough yet benevolent ruler of Mahishmati. She takes over after the king, younger brother of her physically-challenged husband (Nassar), dies. Having been ruled out from being the emperor due to his disability, he is out to take revenge but waits for the right time. His son Bhallaladeva (Rana) and nephew Amarendra Baahubali (Prabhas) are forerunners for the royal throne.

Palace intrigue and villainy is written all over on the journey to choose king. Living in captivity is a vendetta thirsty Devasena who is collecting twigs for Bhallala’s pyre. Years take a quantum leap and we are now in this slave-stricken kingdom where Kattappa (Satyaraj) pledges his allegiance to the king of Mahishmati, whoever it is.

And so, he would do anything to save King Bhallaladeva – even trade his life – but at the same time desperately hopes for his end. He has his sympathies with the royal wing that has been done with namely Baahubali. You guessed it right. While Baahu is the do-gooder statesman in the making, Bhalla is the crafty cousin who has inherited the throne by his villainy.

Detailed war scenes have the audience going delirious when Baahubali does the impossible. We have our tryst with mythology and a collective psyche that identifies with it. When heads are chopped off and men killed, the audience goes delirious with hope, anger and approval. The crew gets the better of the cast.

The polished cinematography is reminiscent of Mani Ratnam’s ‘Villain’. KK Senthil Kumar (cinematography) is a statement in himself. VFX (V Srinivas Mohan) and art (Sabu Cyril) are so good that they make every shot look like a canvas rather than a slice-of-life moment. That clearly points to the fact that Rajamouli may well have lost the plot! Tamannaah is woefully miscast. The brawl guys are at it with a vengeance – Prabhas, Rana and Satyaraj.

In a short punch-packed role Ramya Krishna is restrained. The rest are genuinely inconsequential. The film fails to connect. I suspect that the filmmaker’s reliance on technology is the reason for its undoing. The film is soulless, the romance insipid, the heroics overdone, the music strained, the audience unruly, the atmosphere frenzied beyond compare, the hype self-defeatist, the narration tardy, the expectations too high to meet.

Farcical romance and copious war scenes occupy too large a slice of the narration and rob you off those magical moments that make for good cinema. The film celebrates the Veda Vyasa take. It reiterates that ‘we the people’ will swallow with glee anything and exploitation is the staple diet. However, we live on hope. The Messiah is coming. ‘Baahubali – The Conclusion’. Wait on!

Movie Name : Baahubali The Beginning

Cast : Prabhas, Rana, Anushka, Tamannaah and Ramya Krishna

Direction : SS Rajamouli

Genre : Fantasy

Likes : Technical values, great watch

Dislikes : No emotions

By L Ravichander