In occasione dei 25 anni di carriera di Sanjay Leela Bhansali, vi segnalo il video ufficiale celebrativo, nonché l'articolo A tour through Sanjay Leela Bhansali's cities of dreams, di Baradwaj Rangan, pubblicato ieri da Film Companion:
'The masochistic unattainability of love by at least one of the vertices of the triangle is something that's always watered this director's imagination. (...) I do not think Bhansali has ever entered the modern era, or even the real world. (...) Even if the places "look" real, they are cities of dreams, cities you won't find in any map of the world because they exist only in Bhansali's imagination. (...)
It took a while for this Bhansali to bloom. His first two films aren't his. (...) He's trying (...) to get those images from inside his head onto the frame that the audience will see them in, but keeps failing, and failing. (...) These two films had too much generic melodrama, and it's only when we come to Devdas that we finally get inspired melodrama: in this sado-masochistic (...) story, Bhansali finds the pitch on screen to match the pitch he's been hearing inside his head. (...) Devdas is the first real Sanjay Leela Bhansali movie. (...)
It's not just the writing, but also the way he uses colour that singles him out. (...) Bhansali's dream worlds require dream logic. (...) In a Hindi cinema landscape littered with filmmakers who write in English and quote English filmmakers as inspiration, Bhansali is one of the last of the traditionalists. His "madness", if you will, reflects the emotion-filled Indian nature. (...)
It's not that every film of Bhansali's, post-Devdas, has been successful in its entirety. But he is one of the handful of original, homegrown Indian filmmakers who can be counted on to give us at least 10-20 scenes (even in the lesser films) that sear themselves into memory. (...) His love for artifice and theatricality, his love for Indian music and Indian folk arts and Indian movie-making traditions, (...) his love for beauty and symmetry. But this beauty isn't just empty prettiness. (...) At his best, no one comes close to the mix of the real and the unreal that Bhansali unleashes on the big screen. (...) It's a style. And no one does it better'.
