Vi segnalo l'articolo A celebration of life, di Subhash K. Jha, pubblicato oggi da The Indian Express. Il pezzo è dedicato a Rangeela, uno dei film hindi più famosi, diretto da Ram Gopal Varma e interpretato da Urmila Matondkar, Aamir Khan e Jackie Shroff. Di seguito un estratto:
'Ram Gopal Varma is a director who is known for films that border on violence and drama. But he revealed a completely different facet with Rangeela, which belonged to a different genre. (...) Playing the middleclass Mumbai girl Mili (the protagonist's name was a furtive tribute by director Ram Gopal Varma to Hrishikesh Mukherjee), Urmila Matondkar rocked the box office and changed the definition of how the conventional heroine conducted herself on screen. (...) She scorched the screen, gyrating sensuously to A.R. Rahman's seductive sounds, (...) in her sizzling Manish Malhotra outfit. The magic of the movies is that it foretells a success story even before the story unfolds. Urmila, who did half a dozen inconsequential films before Rangeela, never anticipated the tremendous response that her character whipped at the boxoffice.
A fairy tale
The plot was a cleverly cloaked fairytale. The girl dreams of stardom, is secretly loved by the street hoodlum Munna (Aamir Khan) but is swept off her feet by the nation's hearththrob Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff). The film was fresh, sassy, unselfconsciously and unabashedly dream-like in choreography, mood and tempo. Mili's life at home is portrayed with a lightness of touch that Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) never seemed to achieve in his subsequent films, which progressively leant towards dark, blood-soaked themes. In Rangeela, the delight RGV derived in portraying the joy of first love, of success or the first dance of effervescence is vividly portrayed in Urmila's performance. (...) Rangeela is RGV's lightest film to date. Its unmistakable power can be traced to Urmila's restive performance. She epitomises the yearnings of the young Mumbai girl with a strong family support-system to realise her dreams. To Mili, family also means Munna (Aamir Khan). (...) One of the finest performances of Aamir's career, Munna gave Aamir a chance to let go, simply have fun with a part without delving deeply into the character. The scenes where he coaches Urmila to memorise her dialogues for her shooting the next day, depicts the unrequited love, as he gets 'in character'. (...) The lovelorn looks he darts at Mili when she isn't looking (she has her eyes trained to a distant dream) kept Munna's character on the level of a street-smart lover-boy without reducing him to a love lost caricature. (...)
A novel experience
Interestingly, films set in the film world fared dismally at the box office. (...) Rangeela was another experience altogether. The excesses of the entertainment industry were harnessed into telling a tale where it was okay for the wannabe screen queen to replace the tantrum-throwing leading lady. Rangeela is all about wish fulfilment. Urmila gets stardom. Aamir gets Urmila. The superstar Jackie Shroff is left to walk the lonely path. You can't have a love story without a broken heart. While the songs and dances were uniquely evocative and erotic, scenes from the film industry were a tongue-in-cheek narration of reality. (...) RGV wove the wackiness of Bollywood into a fresh tale of rags-to-riches saga. The working-class wannabe star was draped in dresses that defied gravity. RGV never resorted to low-angle vulgarity. His camera had not begun to peer between thighs and down cleavages as yet. Rangeela is a celebration of unalloyed innocence. The fun quotient flowed freely and seamlessly from the actors' own enjoyment of the material that was served up to accentuate the contrast between dreamlike aspiration and harsh reality. Significantly, Munna sold tickets at blackmarket rates outside the theatres where Mili aspired to be on screen. It was the perfect blend of fantasy and reality - stuff that Bollywood fariytales are made of.
Rangeela Trivia
* Urmila's character was partly based on RGV's dream woman Sridevi. (...)
* Actor Rajesh Joshi who played Aamir Khan's friend Pakiya died soon after in a road accident. He was actor Manoj Joshi's sibling.
* The unforgettable performance by the waiter, when Aamir takes Urmila to a 5-star hotel for lunch, apparently provoked RGV to say the waiter performed better than Aamir in the scene. The actor who unknowingly caused a rift between Ramu and Aamir was the Gujarati stage television and film actor Rajeev Mehta.
* Aamir and RGV fell out after Rangeela, both vowing they'd never work with the other.
* Madhur Bhandarkar who worked as an assistant to RGV made a cameo appearance during a scene showing a film shoot'.
