Baahubali

My response to Baaubali, an Indian epic film, conceived in equal parts of Hindu mythology, Marvel comic books' action films, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings franchise is puzzling.  Generally, I loathe films based on comic book and, particularly, detest the Marvel cycle which are loud, tedious, and moronic.  But I am about to praise the first half of an almost six hour-long Bollywood super-spectacle that is comprised, mainly of aspects of American films that I dislike.  What accounts for this reaction?

Baahubli, the Beginning is the story of a heroic young man who ventures far from his village into a dangerous landscape of towering peaks and canyons, deserts and avalanches, a crazy vertical chutes and ladders melange of all types of terrain known to man, and a place infested with deadly and cruel enemies.  In the course of the first half of his adventures, the hero, the titular Baahubali, encounters a courageous woman warrior, makes love to her, and, then, ventures into a sinister city, a metropolis that is a bit like Angkor Wat, but comprised of the most baroque Hindu temples imaginable, in order to rescue a Queen who is being slowly roasted to the death by the sun in an iron cage at the center of the vast, pink and yellow conurbation.  After innumerable battles and adventures, Baahubali frees the Queen, who may be his mother, and, then, the tale abruptly flashes back fifty years to supply the context for the dynastic struggle that we have been witnessing.  The film's last third consists of an enormous battle scene, shot at times, it seems, from satellites orbiting the earth, a huge spectacle that ends with Baahubali's father or grandfather, also apparently bearing the same name crowned as king of the realm of Mahistmati, where the action has taken place.  The battle scene, although wildly inventive, is the least interesting part of the movie, although it is a grandiose tour de force in its own right, with warriors of various kinds fighting with all kinds of exotic and awe-inspiring weapons.  This scene is similar in impact to the various battle scenes in Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy and, also, bears a resemblance to some of the combat sequences in Zach Snyder's 300. 

The movie has no intellectual content as far as I can see although there are many song and dance numbers crammed into the picture with weirdly pretentious lyrics about the "river of life" and man's destiny.  The movie is two hours and 38 minutes long and it is entirely slam-bang action -- there are no reflective interludes longer than three or four minutes and, then, the film's next set piece (a violent duel atop a cliff, a love scene, or one or other of the hero's crashing down a slope in advance of an avalanche or swept over a huge waterfall) gets underway.  The fury is more or less continuous.  But it's all fantastically agile, light-weight (despite the film's enormous expense), exuberant, even jolly -- there's no suspense or anxiety because we know everything will turn out all right in the end.  The process by which the narrative subjects its characters to all sorts of outlandish hazards, all of this beautifully and ornately decorated in crystal clear and bright cinematography is what makes the film gripping.  The narrative pace is so ridiculously fast that you can't resist being wholly swept away -- thus, the movie's predominant imagery of vast waterfalls and other sorts of torrents, rapids, and seductions.

In the opening scene, we are shown waterfalls that are thousands of feet tall and about a million times more powerful than Niagara or Victoria Falls, enormous roaring sheets of water that fall from the clouds above.  It's a totally implausible landscape and, yet, one filmed with enormous and precisely observed conviction.  A woman with an arrow embedded in her back carries a baby from within a dark cave.  Some men pursue her, seize her arm, and are about to kill the child, when she draws the arrow out of her spine, uses it to impale one of the men, and, then, seizing his sword cuts down the other enemy.  More bad guys appear and the woman wades out into the middle of the river, vanishing under water but holding the baby in her untrembling hand above the torrent.  The peasants come from their village, virtually in the spray of the falls, and, then, rescue the infant -- the heroic woman drifts down the river, her sari barely glimpsed under the crystal water.  The boy grows up to be a great strong man, a sort of Hindu Hercules.  When his mother vows to pour water on Shiva's lingnam, a giant phallic-shaped pylon of polished granite, the young man aids her by ripping the altar out of the earth, hefting it on his shoulder and, then, carrying the thing down into the river to plant it under a cascade where it will be perpetually washed by the falling water.  (This is the movie's first song and dance number in which the peasants sway rhythmically to the music as a song is crooned about the hero's strength and endurance.)  Later, the young man tries to scale the waterfalls to find where he came from -- each effort ends in him falling hundreds of feet into the river.  At last, he pursues a fairy-girl up the vertiginous heights -- she leads him  to the top of the falls, but when he seizes her sari she dissolves into a cloud of neon-blue butterflies.  Later, we meet the girl again engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an army of villains; she is the leader of the resistance to the evil usurper who is torturing the Queen in the central plaza at Mahistmati.  The girl is wounded, bathes her injured hand in a mountain lake and Baahubali swims underwater, using a reed to tattoo marks around her wrist.  Later, the girl plans an ambush on her enemies -- she draws back the bowstring on her bow and arrow and, then, finds that someone (Baahubali) has entwined a emerald green serpent around her poised arrow -- the serpent entrances the girl and she is motionless as Baahubali tattoos another pattern on her other arm.  Later in the love scene between the two, set among gossamer-Alhambra-esque gazebos, tiny waterfalls, and oozing clouds of dry-ice smoke, the two embrace so that their tattoos form a common pattern, a design that is mutual to both of them -- this is another song-and-dance number with the lyrics expressing things like "I will be reborn a hundred times to delight you." 

And so it goes, from one extravagance to another, all singularly and gorgeously filmed, with fantastically beautiful actors and actresses.  (In Indian films, a secondary sexual characteristic for the actresses are their lithe and expressive bellies often shot in extreme close-up).  In some early scenes, Baahubali must battle a raging bull.  At the base of the shot, the film is marked "CGI" -- we don't want anygood Hindu to think that any  actual bovines were injured in making this movie.  After Bahubali defeats a character named Bhallaldevi (who is apparently his brother), the Queen is freed. Then, the slave Kattappa, a noble character who seems to somehow revel in his slavery, tells the story of the war with the Kalakyas, a race said to have "no limit to their morbidity" -- this cues up the final third of the picture, the huge battle-scene occurring fifty years earlier.  In the course of the fighting, Bhallaldevi, here portrayed as a heroic but ruthless warrior, is about to drive his rotary-scimitar- equipped chariot through a group of peasants dragged onto the battlefield as human shields.  Bahuabali restrains him, has his soldiers hurl bolos to knock the poor peasants to the ground and, then, unleashes a torrent of arrows to kill the vicious Kalakyas who have seized these people.  After the battle the Queen says that a good soldier not only kills his country's enemies but spares the lives of innocents -- thus Bahubali is made king notwithstanding the fact that his rival brother has cut off the head of the general leading the Kalakyas and sent it whirling up into orbit around the earth.  (This mirrors an earlier scene in which cattle are about to sacrificed to Shiva in advance of the battle -- Baahubali, a friend to all cows, slits open his own palm, spills his blood on the weapons, and baptizes them in gore without requiring any of the cattle to suffer.)

The film was shot in Tegulu as well as simultaneously in Tamil.  The version on Netflix where you can watch this thing if you are so inclined is dubbed into Hindi.  Made for 25 million dollars, the film is the most expensive movie ever produced in Bollywood -- it is also the top-grossing Indian film of all time and an enormous hit throughout all of Asia.  Unlike American super-hero films which often have badly designed special effects -- many times, the CGI is dark blue or green to avoid the viewer seeing defects in the programming -- this film is always bright, gaudy, brilliantly colored:  everything is visible but it is all rococo:  when someone bites the dust, the dust is always bright scarlet or purple.  The picture isn't mean-spirited, it's violence is cartoonish, and the actors are immensely engaging.  You must have a taste of this kind of thing.  As I said about LOTR, "it's just a movie for boys" -- but, then, boys are entitled to good movies as much as anyone else.