Ethan Mascarenhas (Hrithik Roshan) is a magician — a nimble performance artist who, before his accident, used to elicit gasps of awe by sliding up and down shafts of light and who now cannot even scratch his nose. He’s a quadriplegic, and he’s confined to a handsome house that, like him, is falling apart. The walls of Ethan’s room are mounted with photographs from his earlier life, but pay special attention to the mirrors that hang between these photographs, reflecting his near-immobile form within their frames, his weakened present constantly being mocked by his virile past.
This is the reason Ethan wants to die, and we learn the reason behind the character’s name — he seeks euthanasia, which he airily dubs Ethanasia. He petitions the courts through his lawyer-friend Devyani (a superb Shernaz Patel), and he awaits deliverance. This is the ostensible story of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Guzaarish.
Fans of the filmmaker, however, may latch on to a more fascinating narrative, which hinges on the question: After the merciless drubbing bestowed on Saawariya, has this director tamped down his ornery eccentricities? Has he forsaken the self-sustaining interiors of his mind and stepped into the outside world, into sunlight, into a more recognisable (and therefore, more digestible) version of life? Has he, in other words, transformed from auteur to audience pleaser, making a Bhansali movie for those who don’t normally care for Bhansali movies?
The surfaces of Guzaarish are certainly familiar. The crucifix symbolism (here in the form of Ethan’s earring), the theatrical production design, the distant tolling of church bells, the God’s-eye-view camera angles, the employment of songs popularised by Nat King Cole — they’re all there, along with the women. Ethan is the quintessential Bhansali protagonist, nourished by feminine fortitude. His servants are Rosie and Maria, and he was raised in the absence of a father by a single mother. (What does this say about a director who has assimilated his mother’s name into his own, and who dedicates every film to his father?)
The quasi-lovers (like Paro and Chandramukhi of Devdas) and the caregivers (like Lillipop and Gulabji of Saawariya) of this story are Devyani and Sofia (a devastatingly beautiful Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, styled like the heroine of a Gabriel García Márquez novel and used very effectively). Among the film’s funniest scenes are those depicting the tight-lipped tug-of-war between these two women over Ethan, who appears to be the only significant man in their lives.
The brazen brandishing of inspirations, again, is pure (and problematic) Bhansali. Like the acknowledgement in Black, over the opening credits, to Helen Keller, he makes little effort to conceal the debts that Guzaarish owes to Whose Life Is It Anyway. “Aakhir yeh zindagi hai kiski?” Ethan’s mother demands, in a startlingly literal translation of the earlier film’s title. Ethan’s spine-snapping accident is a replay of the spine-snapping accident from The Sea Inside (and like Alejandro Amenábar, Bhansali does double duty as composer), and the throwaway shot of a fly on the face from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is exaggerated into an affirmation of Ethan’s equanimity.
Even the placement of Guzaarish in the director’s oeuvre seems to follow an established Bhansali pattern — a twisted love story (Devdas) followed by a drama about disability (Black) followed by a twisted love story (Saawariya) followed by this drama about disability.
And yet, Guzaarish isn’t quite a Bhansali movie. The director appears to be tiptoeing around the intoxicating, hyper-expressionistic style that characterised his films from Devdas onwards. The performances are mostly in a realistic vein. Except for Sofia’s breathless appeal in front of a judge, in court, the dialogues are driven by a sure and steady rhythm, like how people speak in real life and not like how people speak in Bhansali’s films, where the dialogues border on the lyrical and where the lyrics verge on the spoken. And the obsessions are noticeably absent.
We are used to Bhansali’s films being airless, but this is a film that’s bloodless. It’s like sitting in front of a portrait of a storm-tossed sea inside a museum, as opposed to standing at the shore and watching lightning fork over roiling waves to the accompaniment of thunder. The opportunities for melodrama are endless, but Bhansali’s priorities are different this time. Where you think this would be the thorny love story between two damaged souls — Ethan scarred on the outside; Sofia inside — but by the time their love story actually begins, the film ends.
The euthanasia angle doesn’t carry much dramatic heft either. There are several characters — the apprentice magician Omar (Aditya Roy Kapur), or Ethan’s mother — who add very little to the film’s emotional dimensions, and neither are they very relevant to the plot’s progress.
The signature Bhansali moments are few and far between — the lyrical opening stretch that introduces us to Ethan and Sofia, or when Ethan’s battles with raindrops. Still the consummate magician, he summons a downpour on an unexpectedly dry day, but with grim consequences — a leaky roof makes his life hell. An immobile Ethan struggles to overcome the drops of rain battering his face, a prospect made all the more pitiful because of the exaggerated sound effects that make you imagine a fusillade of ping pong balls being rallied across a rec-room table.
This, to my mind, is the truest Bhansali comes to being his willful, eccentric self in Guzaarish — elsewhere, it’s like watching Verdi oversee a production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and this incongruity is exacerbated by this director’s uneasy relationship with reality. Every time we move out of the hermetic ecosystem of Ethan’s mansion and into the real world — a radio-listener montage, or the cheap sessions of courtroom theatrics where, instead of Bhansali’s customary framing of characters in relation to props and to each other, we keep cutting between an exhausting series of head shots and reaction shots — the film droops into dullness.
Hrithik Roshan, however, does his darnedest to keep us watching. His vein-popping histrionics fit flawlessly on a character whose only vehicle for expression is his face. The casting works beautifully because of how he moves (the then-versus-now contrast is highlighted and double-underlined by his preternaturally fluid grace) and how he looks — even his double-thumb comes off like a magic effect. With his face framed by unruly tresses, he looks, at times, like a rock-star Jesus, never more so than when propped up against a support, crestfallen, as the judge reads out his verdict. Had Ethan’s arms been outstretched, this might have been a replay of Pontius Pilate issuing a sentence to a man on a crucifix. Of such indelible images are passion plays made.
baradwajrangan@expressbuzz.com