(In Marrakech Film Festival.) Running-time: 150 MIN. Reviewed at AMC Burbank Town Center 8, Burbank, Nov. On “Ram-Leela,” he is credited as writer, director, producer, editor and songwriter. He builds enormous sets that are perfect down to last detail, and then stages the action in front them, as if they were theatrical backdrops. He’s an enthusiastic showman, although his style doesn’t always feel cinematic. Best known internationally for his 2002 remake of the perennial Indian classic “Devdas,” he has also made lavish prestige films based on literary sources as unlikely as “The Miracle Worker” (2005’s “Black”) and Dostoyevsky’s “White Nights” (2007’s “Saawariya”). “Ram-Leela” is often a visually dazzling affair, which is pretty much the least we’ve come to expect from director Bhansali, one of Bollywood’s most devoted pictorialists. They never convey the required emotional depth and turmoil.
As actors, however, they may simply to be too down to earth, too level headed, to be convincingly star-crossed. It helps that both performers are terrific, athletic dancers. The film has five credited choreographers, which probably accounts for the fact that the styles of dancing vary significantly from scene.
The most effective sequences the two stars have together are the large-scale dance numbers, which are beautifully and imaginatively staged. Rapidly rising star Deepika Padukone (“Chennai Express”) is Leela, staunchly resisting her family’s attempts to arrange a marriage with a dweeby Indian from London.
Ram is an anomaly in this hair-trigger community because he would much rather chase women than the clan’s enemies. The impressively fit and charismatic young actor Ranveer Singh (“Lootera”) is Ram, a “brother” (Bhai) in a crime family whose businesses include gun running and pornography. Gujurat into which themes from Shakespeare have been stirred. In truth, this is no region of the real world: it is a theme park fantasy version of O.G. The period is probably not worth trying to pin down: the characters talk constantly on cell phones and sell pirated DVDs, but they also drive dusty black 1940s cars. Bhansali moves Shakespeare’s story to a Sicilian-style culture of violent clan conflict in small town Gujurat, in Northwestern India, with some additional sequences in the tourist-destination palaces of Rajasthan.
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