In the small Bombay cinema that showed great films, his father took him – again and again – to see the greatest of them all.
With each of his 18 viewings of “Mughal-e-Azam,” a hit 1960 musical about a forbidden romance between a prince and a courtesan, the young boy fell more and more in love. The rays of light, radiated in black and white, opened up to him a world that was both majestic and lost. The dialogue, lively and poetic, lingered in his thoughts. Music took him to places he would not fully understand until later in life.
Bombay would eventually become Mumbai. India, cinema and music, they would all change too. But more than half a century later, Sanjay Leela Bhansali – now 61 years old and a rare master of the great old style of Indian cinema – has not given up his place in this small cinema, Alankar Talkies, at edge of the city’s red street. -light quarter.
His spirit remains anchored there even if his work goes beyond the walls of the theater. Her latest project, released Wednesday, is an eight-episode musical drama on Netflix that gives a “Game of Thrones” treatment to an exalted milieu of courtesans in pre-independence India.
The “Heeramandi” spectacle provides more space for Mr. Bhansali’s expansive and demanding approach than any two-hour film. But it also presents a tricky challenge. How, with big-budget textures and colors, to bring the splendor and grandeur of royalty – in his imagination, courtesans lived like queens – to an audience who, at least in his native India, will watch largely on tiny mobile screens?
One answer is technical: more close-ups. The other is personal: a vision of its own. With his decades of commercial success, he has the right to cling to the kind of cinema – song-filled nostalgia mixed with obsessive attention to light and detail – that he fell in love with early and forever.
“I’m still in Alankar Talkies,” he said in an interview last summer, between filming. “I see it on that big screen over there.”
” In large scale “
Outside, Mumbai was flooded by monsoon rains.
Inside, under the shed that covered the three acres of scenery, Mr. Bhansali was lost in a city born as much of imagination as of research.
Hundreds of workers worked for almost 10 months to create the Lahore of the early 1900s. The furniture was vintage. The curtains and miniature designs on the hallway walls were hand painted. The slogans on the city walls, the store signs – all calligraphy, aged and faded.
When his friend Moin Beg presented him with a 14-page concept for the project about 20 years ago, Mr. Bhansali sat on it. There were too many characters, too many things happening for a feature film.
In the years that followed, Mr. Bhansali felt like he was practicing “how to handle things on a large scale.” He made successful films – in an environment of declining artistic expression that made him the subject to violent attack – which dealt with dancers and royal courts. A consistent theme was that of complex, powerful and beautiful women.
Another important step: he began to create music for his own films.
Some of his most profound artistic questions since childhood were triggered by music. Thanks to music, the conviction was born that every artist is a soul 200 or 300 years old. The artistic process is a slow discovery of what the soul already knows.
In Alankar Talkies, the boy forgot the actors on screen and let himself be transported by the voice by Indian singer Bade Ghulam Ali Khan.
“Somewhere the soul started to react,” he said, “I kind of understand that, I know where my father is trying to take me because I traveled somewhere in the past” ..’”
His heart was set on ‘Heeramandi’ because so many things came together in one world: refined taste, classical music and dance, power politics and powerful women.
Before independence in 1947, India was a collection of princely states under British rule. Elite patronage had given rise to courtesan neighborhoods, and an ecosystem of music, dance, and fashion developed around them.
Heeramandi was one such place in the city of Lahore, which after the partition of India became a part of Pakistan. Urdu-language writer Shorish Kashmiri described Heeramandi, even in its decline, as “an art gallery where nights stay awake and days sleep”.
The Netflix series captures a Heeramandi where courtesans know they are the last of their kind.
But this is not a slow march towards nothingness. Mr. Bhansali brings women into the whirlwind of the Indian freedom movement.
“I always give my characters way more than they deserve in life,” he said. “I wanted them to be bathed in fountains – big hallways and big mirrors, so the reflections seemed larger than life.”
Every movement
On his sets, it’s total abandonment to a vision that never stops changing in Mr. Bhansali’s head. Some actors described its process as tortuous and difficult. Others have compared it to film school.
“What my role began and what it became – a lot of that happened on paper, and a lot of it happened on set,” said Sonakshi Sinha, the lead actress of series.
Ms. Sinha was shooting two small segments that day.
The first was the last bit of a song. In her climax, Mrs. Sinha’s character weaves through a crowd of guests in her living room, toward her veranda, drink in hand. She looks at a rival lady across the street, raises her glass and throws it away.
Take after take, Mr. Bhansali hammered home one point: every movement, every gesture had to be done in such a way that the eyes, the glare, remained the center of attention.
“If you come and pour, then there is no joy,” he told Ms Sinha. “Take a beat.”
The segment they shot next showed how Mr. Bhansali thinks and how obsessed he is.
It was supposed to be simple: Mrs. Sinha’s character was blowing out candles, symbolizing the closure of Heeramandi so that courtesans could join the fight for freedom.
During a bathroom break, Mr. Bhansali walked past a chandelier. As he stood in front of the urinal, he had a new vision: Ms. Sinha’s character used a pulley to lift the chandelier, wrapped in a curtain, then walked away when the lights went out.
It took five hours to light and complete the shot, for a five-second scene.
Frustrated that it wasn’t quite right, Mr. Bhansali turned to what helps him connect to his abstraction: music. He asked an assistant to play an old song, a ghazal, on an iPad. The voice softly fills the air – then another take.
‘My place’
When his father, a never-successful producer, was on his deathbed, he had a special request: he sent his son to fetch a tape of a tribal singer who, after the division of India, had ended up on the Pakistani side, where their own family had roots.
He wanted to hear the song “Hayo Raba” by Reshma – a raw, untrained voice.
By the time young Sanjay returned with the tape, his father was unconscious. The scene that unfolded still plays in his mind.
“He had fallen into a coma,” Mr. Bhansali said. “I had no place to play ‘Hayo Rabba’ and my mother kept telling me, ‘Play ‘Hayo Rabba’! »
Why this song? The closest thing to an answer is that in his father’s hallucination state, he was in contact with his ancestors.
“Life is so fascinating,” he says. “Will movies ever be able to capture this?
He spent his life seeing if it was possible.
Around the age of 6, his father took him to a film set. He told her to wait in the corner while he talked to his friends.
A cabaret was being shot.
“A scantily clad woman ate an apple and threw it at a half-naked man,” he recalls.
As he looked up – to the catwalk with ropes and lights and hanging screens – he was lost in wonder.
“I realized I didn’t want to be on the cricket field, I didn’t want to be in school, I didn’t want to be anywhere. I want to be here. This is my home,” he said.
“That woman biting that apple and throwing it at the man – I think that child was seduced.”
