Did Sanjay Leela Bhansali deserve the National Award for Bajirao Mastani?

There are certain filmmakers who were perhaps born to walk away with the Best Director award every time a film of theirs was in the reckoning. For what it’s worth Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s sheer aura and madness when it comes to creating cinema would somehow make him an automatic choice for such a hallowed list if it ever existed. But, should the fact that a film would cease to be what it is if Bhansali’s name were to be removed from every single film in his oeuvre, be reason enough to acknowledge the filmmaker?

For a viewer it’s almost close to impossible to avoid being swept away by the tsunami that Bhansali’s visuals create for every single thing in a Sanjay Leela Bhansali frame is designed to hit your senses and the filmmaker leaves no stone unturned be it the scale of the production or the scope of his vision to do that. It is this quality that makes the audience, fellow filmmakers, as well as the critics, applaud Bhansali even when he ends up peddling nonsense in the name of cinema.

This fine characteristic could have also played a large role in prompting the 11-member jury for Feature Films at this year’s National Film Awards to bestow Bhansali with his first-ever Best Director National Award for Bajirao Mastani.

One of the biggest filmmakers ever to grace Hindi cinema, Bhansali is a one-man army when it comes to executing grand cinematic ideas. He would also be the only filmmaker today who in the truest sense of the word couldn’t care less for the parameters such as box-office performance or commercial feasibility, et al that governs his lesser illustrious colleagues. At the same time, Bhansali is also the only filmmaker who couldn’t be bothered with authenticity, accuracy and other such yardsticks when it comes to creating cinema.

He is the only filmmaker who could not only take Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s much-loved parable Devdas and give it a saas-bahu serial makeover in the name of creative license. After all, in the dozen odd adaptations of the novel no one could come with the idea of putting Chandramukhi and Paro in the same space, at the same time and heck even make them dance the same steps.

Going beyond rehashing beloved stories, Bhansali can reinterpret history and tips his own hat to himself and get Peshwa Bajirao’s two wives to indulge in some synchronised dancing. The fact that Bhansali can get away with such only shows the hallowed space he occupies in the pantheon of contemporary filmmakers and that, in some wrapped sense, is reason enough to award him. Bajirao Mastani might be historically inaccurate and in spite of having earned the wrath of the Peshwa Bajirao’s descendants who wrote an open letter lambasting the filmmaker for distorting history or chided by people within the industry such as Bharat Dabolkar for having "modulated Peshwa Bajirao’s love story to suit his vision" but it still remains a cinematic achievement to a great degree.

Bhansali getting the Best Director nod could be a foregone conclusion basis the film having walked away with a bevy of the technical awards for Best Cinematography (Sudeep Chatterjee), Best Choreography (Remo D’Souza), production design (Saloni Dhatrak, Sriram Iyengar, Sujeet Sawant) and Best Sound Re-recording (Justin Jose) besides the Best Supporting Actress (Tanvi Azmi).

Bhansali is a stylist and his stature as one has only grown with every subsequent film. Yet if one were to scratch slightly beneath the surface of the well-chiseled mise-en-scène where style, not necessarily a bad thing, is applied to the image, the subject, the music, the effects, etc. one would, unfortunately, end up finding an ornamentation of substance instead of substance.

The director’s trademark of bludgeoning the senses with an overkill of just about everything in order to convey the simplest of emotions ends up reeking of a hollowness that is inescapable in his films, which, ironically, are often hailed as winners when it comes to emotional quotient. There are many instances within Bajirao Mastani where the characters are supposedly undergoing life-altering sentiments and instead of flourishing, the performers, who unlike actors in some other Bhansali films are blessed with material that doesn’t have to rely on histrionics, are forced into subordination to the director’s grandiosity.

On the face of it, there is enough to validate Bhansali’s win as the Best Director – the film is but a triumph of the director’s inimitable vision – but what if the vision, for the want of a better word, is flawed? It’s rather unfortunate that the legend of Peshwa Bajirao, something that possessed all the right ingredients needed for a truly great film, ended up falling short in the hands of the one filmmaker who had the right credentials to take it to the next level. Bhansali has been toying with the idea of translating the romance of Bajirao and Mastani for more than a decade and had even announced a version with Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor in the titular roles.

For a filmmaker to live with such a towering subject for such a long time and to embrace it with one’s own existence can be excruciating and more so for Bhansali, who can make the simplest things akin to carrying the weight of the world. In his own words, Bhansali feels that Bajirao Mastani is a tribute to Mughal-e-Azam, but it’s surprising that instead of choosing to create something that could have been as eternal as Mughal-e-Azam Bhansali opts for fleeting glory in the form the aaina mahal set or the "Deewani mastani" song.

Bhansali’s cinema is inflated because its traits such as the recreation of a larger-than-life cinematic style itself are but an inflated virtue. Some might say such stylish emptiness ought not to be awarded and some might rejoice the win but, in either case, one can’t undermine Bhansali. The thing is what does one do when someone capable of transcending settles for less.

(The author was a part of the three-member jury for this year’s National Award for Best Writing for Cinema.)