More than a month ago, the second part of S.S. Rajamouli's Baahubali premiered in cinemas around the world. Outside of India, there was little buzz about the movie: mainstream audiences watched the summer movie season with several boring derivative remakes or reboots, while cinephiles were anticipating the feature films of the Cannes film festival. But this film was the little film that could; it destroyed several local box office records and is now the highest grossing Indian movie worldwide, even debuting at number 3 at the Hollywood box office at the time of its release.
After seeing both parts, Baahubali is an amazing experience; it is in many ways a finely crafted series of movies, and both are now among my favorite films of the year. While it tells a story as old as time, it is in the sheer ambition and audacity of the film's craft where it truly shines. It's action packed filled with romance, comedy and drama, combining these ingredients into a fresh and tasty masala.
It should be noted that Baahubali is not a Bollywood film, which many people equate with Indian cinema. Baahubali is a film made in Tollywood, the Telugu-language film industry operating mainly out of Hyderabad. As I've noted in some of my previous posts, Bollywood's southern brethren, producing movies in the Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada languages, collectively make up the South Indian film industry. While producing more films per year in terms of output compared to their Mumbai counterpart, they operate mostly in the shadow of their more well-known brother.
And if you look at the basic story structure of Baahubali as a whole, it mirrors the common structure of a South Indian action revenge film - an introductory setup, a climactic interval sequence, a lengthy flashback showing the protagonist's intentions and backstory, and a climactic conclusion. This story within a story storytelling device is popular with, but not new to Indian cinema - it predates movies and dates all the way back to the great Sanskrit epics.
Baahubali is heavily inspired by these epics, especially the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It's woven into a Hero's Journey type of story with a modern cinematic sensibility that is easily palatable for modern audiences. And while the film may look conventional, in the context of Indian cinema, this is a daring experiment. Rajamouli has been known to push the boundaries of mainstream filmmaking with some of his recent films. His 2012 film Eega recontextualizes the South Indian revenge film by having a man reincarnated as a fly as the enactor of revenge, while his 2009 film Magadheera contains some of the conceptual seeds that would become Baahubali, as it tells a tale of a bike racer who has visions of a tragic past life. Magadheera, at the time, inspired a wave of other films in the other regional industries which explored similar themes.
The film is buoyed by an exceptional ensemble cast. Prabhas, who has starred mostly in romantic comedies and some action flicks before this, is perfect as Baahubali, a hero virtuous to a fault. He's worked with Rajamouli before in one of his early films, Chhatrapati (2005). He is balanced out by Rana Daggubati, whose character is driven with more complex emotions of guilt, jealousy and anger. Ramya Krishnan, Tamannaah Bhatia and Anushka Shetty are capable female leads, especially Krishnan and Shetty, who play very strong female characters for an Indian production. my favorite role has to go to the esteemed veteran Tamil actor Sathyaraj, who plays Baahubali's loyal companion Katappa. His character arc of loyalty, betrayal and redemption is the film's most powerful in my opinion.
M.M. Keeravani does the soundtrack. It uses leitmotifs and songs in very interesting and poetic ways. As any layman probably knows, many Indian movies tend to be musicals. The musical intervals may be used to illustrate a person's viewpoint, introduce a character or substitute for a romantic interlude like a love scene. Here, the usage of songs does not only that, but it also adds several more complex layers to the narrative.
And here is where the film really, truly shines. It's true that the movie is not perfect and has its faults. You could fault it for having uneven CGI: the film was made at ~30 million dollars each, which is a pittance compared to modern Hollywood blockbuster budgets.The action sequences could be described as over the top, but in this context I think the action sequences are justified, as we are seeing demigods on the battlefield, of course I would expect things to be ramped up to almost silly levels of awesomeness. (Not to mention it's very entertaining.) The film builds up some characters, while under-developing others, especially during the duology's final climactic act. Despite all of that, there are moments in this film that shine like magic.
One of these magical scenes is my favorite scene in the entire movie series. Notice the picture above. It's from one of the earliest musical sequences in the film. The main character, Shivudu, has been trying to scale this wall of water for almost all of his life, never succeeding once. He is haunted by the apparition of a woman after seeing a mask fall down from the waterfall, and he becomes a little obsessed by it. This sequence sees him attempting to scale the mountain for the last time, guided by her spirit. Employing a mix of live action footage and CGI, it's absolutely gorgeous to watch. It's accompanied by Keeravani's song Dhivara (the title of the song changes depending on the language version, this is the original Telugu title), whose lyrics are mixed in with Sanskrit chants. These chants themselves have multiple poetic layers of meaning, and to the person that understands these layers, it gives him or her a deeper understanding of the scene. By the time he scales the mountain, there is a palpable feeling of triumph, and a sense that the Hero's Journey has just begun.
In the end, this daring experiment has proven fruitful to the filmmakers and cast. It seems to have an appeal that is pan-Indian as it has reached Indians from all over the country, even members of the Indian diaspora scattered all over the world. This is a big deal in light of the fact that India is a large country of many provinces and many languages and cultures, often entrenched with their own film industries. What this film has done is it has given the Indian people something to be proud of as one of the world's oldest and largest cinematic cultures.
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