First Take | While making West Side Story, Steven Spielberg should’ve taken cues from In The Heights, or even Saawariya-Entertainment News , Firstpost

What a relief to know that Steven Spielberg will not be making another musical in his lifetime.

Bhaiyya, ek  hi qafi hai. Humein baqsh do! [Forgive us, one is enough!] West Side Story is a completely  unnecessary remake of Robert Wise’s 1961 ebullient musical feature film. There is nothing Wise about Spielberg’s  remake, which is as flat as a pancake, and as listless as an apple-pie left to wither in the sun.

The actors are an energetic lot, no doubt about it. But nothing compared to what Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer brought to the screen in the original. Their replacements Ansel Elgort and Rachel Ziegler are zestful and zingy. But at best, adequate substitutes. They create no magic whatsoever on screen. It is like watching two siblings dancing on a reality show where the judges are Farah Khan and Remo D’Souza, and the chief guest John Travolta refused to turn up at the last moment. In other words, a flop show from the word go.

Why would anyone of Spielberg’s stature do this to himself? I can see the challenge in it for Spielberg: take the clichéd Romeo-Juliet story (there is a firescape sequence renovating the timeless balcony scene) and turn it into  his own kind of magic. Sadly, the outcome is more tragic than magic. We are left looking at Puerto Rican boys and  girls dancing and singing to challenge the ‘Gringos’: that is what the local American youngsters are called.

The two sides fight and dance and sing, and behave like what they are: wastrels  with wasps in their waists, and a rumble in their bellies. Some of the choreography that is original is exciting. Those adapted from the original are  casualties of excessive freedom. None of the cast is anywhere close to echoing the unstoppable energy of the original.

Puerto Rican Maria and American Tony meet at party. It is, you guessed, love at first sight. From these bland beginnings, it is downhill for the storytelling, which flirts with flimsiness with the enthusiasm of a young teenaged girl trying to get the attention of a local hoodlum by wearing her mother’s high heels and lipstick.

The romance grows not so much out of their mutual affection as the classic music score by Leonard Bernstein, which bursts at the seams to make its presence felt. Because the songs are not accompanied by any convincing choreography. The actors take to the ethnic milieu simmering with a zest which, at best, is applicable to the milieu they occupy so insolently.

What an utter ‘waist’ of  time and pace! Musicals in Hollywood have a hoary history. In The Heights, directed by  Jon M Chu, capturing the highs and lows of the Latin American community in New York, is a dream come true. Not because it is majestic musical on par with The Sound Of Music, The King & I or more recently, La La Land  (which I find enormously overrated). But because it brings a certain sting and sweep to the epic musical genre as we move from one well-written musical number to another, creating a cascading blend of zingy sounds and vibrant dancing by a young cast that knows Bollywood is not the only bastion of ‘ditty’ dancing. Ditties and dances throw open their arms to welcome us in this Broadway-styled musical.

The plot may be just a pretext for the music and dancing. But who cares! The film ricochets with a melodic  impact, imparting a sense of advancing sonorousness to the peppy proceedings, as we get to know the film’s   young Dominican hero Usnavi (Anthony Ramos, naturally gifted), who dreams of owning his own business even as he scrubs and shines and polishes other people’s dreams for a living. This is Cinderella with a gender reversal and a powerhouse musical  propensity that spins an affable web around our hearts as Usnavi’s silent crush for  Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) is all but crushed under the wheels of their individual dreams.

Though the film refuses to dwell on the despondency of the community’s poverty, there is no dearth of  heartbreaks in the narration as the dreamers of the show scarcely ever get a chance to be doers. There is  Nina (the beautiful Leslie Grace) ready  to throw away her dream of college education because her father (Jimmy Smits) cannot afford it, even though he insists he can. Although the cast’s dreams are downcast, there is no room for despair of despondency as the characters are perpetually in the swing of things, defying dancing their way into a light at  the end of the tunnel, revelling in an Arcadian bubble, almost like the current  situation where weddings and parties thrive as if COVID-19 has ceased to exist.

In The Heights is the ultimate musical experience. Hats off to the the Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M Chu for  doing fullsome and voluptuous justice to the theme. Chu chews on the chimerical canvas, imparting a sense of  ongoing flourish and excitement to the flimsiest of plot conventions.

Only one person dies during the course of the two-and-a-half hour plot. Never weighed down by melancholy, In The Heights, true to its title, stays afloat singing, dancing, and clawing its way to hard-earned glory.

In our homeland, the one contemporary filmmaker who gets the musical right time after time is Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Saawariya does not have the in-your-face flamboyance of Devdas or Black where almost every shot reached a crescendo, every passion peaked like a mid-summer sun, and every movement denoted drama. But Saawariya is Bhansali’s most tender ode to love yet.

Taking Fyodor Dostoevsky’s minuscule play White Nights, Bhansali has built a huge but unimposing edifice of  emotions classified by dollops of awe-inspiring studio-erected architecture that represents feelings rather than physical forms. This is the director’s most subtle and mellow creation. Prakash Kapadia’s dialogues let Ranbir Kapoor’s character of Ranbir Raj speak in a language that is modern and yet timelessly lovelorn.

The plot, if one may call it that, is a story of unrequited love told in shades of blue. Bhansali’s narrative spins its sensuous web around chance encounters in and around a square set in a timeless land, where clocks chime to the rhythm of a besotted heart and neon signs straight out of a bright Broadway pay cheeky homage to Bollywood’s past, including Raj Kapoor, of course. Ranbir Raj sings and performs at a club called Raj’s Bar when he is not chasing the enigmatic Sakina (Sonam Kapoor) across an arched bridge that symbolises the end of hope and the beginning of love.

Sakina, if you must know, is on an eternal wait. A stranger (Salman Khan) walked into her home and life, walked out and promised to return. The lacuna between longing and fulfilment is filled by a young man who dances, sings, makes faces, writes love letters, protects Sakina from the rain, but alas, cannot protect himself from the heartbreak that awaits him under the bridge.

You can see reflections of Raj Kapoor’s persona from Sri 420 and Chhalia in Ranbir’s acting in Saawariya. And his relationship with his outwardly harsh landlady — played by the gloriously spirited Zohra Sehgal — is a wonderful recreation of the bond between Raj Kapoor and Lalita Pawar in Anari.

Ranbir’s acting is a dangerously extravagant and bravura performance that could have toppled over under the weight of the character’s inherent exhibitionism. But with his director’s help, Ranbir succeeds. The emotions that run across the gossamer frames of this fragilely structured play-on-celluloid are woven with the delicacy that one associates with Kashmiri carpets. Ironically, though requiring more attention than all his earlier works, Saawariya is Bhansali’s simplest story to date. The age-old boy-meets-girl format has been taken to the plane of purest musical expressionism.

The enchanting encounters shown in the film furnish the slim but haunting plot with the feeling of a play where the characters forget they are on stage. The film consciously created staginess is its biggest virtue. It lends an otherworldly quality to the frames. The wispy characters may or may not exist outside the prostitute-narrator Rani Mukerji’s playful mind.

Maybe she’s making up this beautiful tale of one-sided love and perhaps the boy-man she took under her wings is just a figment of her imagination.The disarming delicacy with which art directors Omang and Vinita Kumar and cinematographer Ravi Chandran have built the blue foundations of the film’s ravishingly romantic imagination lifts Dostoevsky’s play to the sphere of poetry.

Monty Sharma’s soul-stirring music adds an entirely new dimension to the story of waiting and suffering. As expected from a Bhansali creation, the film is bathed in visuals that overpower the senses. The sequence where Sonam runs across a gauntlet of perpendicularly hung carpets beating a dust storm out of their beautiful fabric is a moment of sensual eruption.

Saawariya is like a dream where the characters themselves live in a dream world. Escape from this world is akin to death. No one dies in Bhansali’s majestic make-believe world and nothing wilts. Not even love when it is taken away from the boy who loves to entertain the unhappy girl in distress.

The musical form of cinematic expression comes naturally to Indian  filmmakers. It is sad that we are running away from songs and dances in our films in favour of a more ‘European’ form of expression, where characters  do not sing their  emotions. They fling them into the void that separates the screen from the audience, hoping that some of it would stick. None of it did in West Side Story. West gone to waste.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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