SAAT RANG KE SAPNE

The same perennial difficulty crops up with Saat Rang Ki Sapne, whose rainbow-hued promos have teased us into eager anticipation. Priyadarshan’s remake of his Malayalam superhit for ABCL is so ravishingly beautiful to look at and tells such a refreshingly different story that you wish you could hail it with an unqualified, enthusiastic Yes!

Alas! the usual qualifiers take over, even as you are engrossed in the jewel-bright colours splashing across picture perfect settings (Ravi K Chandran’s cinematography) and marvel at the perfectly matched cuts of the precision editing (N Gopalakrishnan’s editing). As a bonus, Priyadarshan gives you lyrical passages which delight in being spectacular rather than delicate. Rajasthan’s magnificent beauty dictates much of the narrative style. With so much going for it, we are still left cribbing about the film’s unbearable length and the whimpering climax that takes at least 30 minutes too long in coming.

There is only a certain length to which you can stretch a slight romantic comedy built around misunderstood messages and deliberate deceptions. There is of course the usual sentimentality of surrogate family bonds and the drama of feudal loyalties and hatreds. To be fair, Priyadarshan infuses these familiar ingredients with a degree of surprising freshness and softens the feudal edge with comedy and subdued melodrama.

Saat Rang Ke Sapne is so palpably superior in its craftsmanship that you wish Priyadarshan had exercised similar care over building up the climax which takes for ever to reach. And that he had thought even more carefully while adapting the story to a Rajasthani ethos to avoid embarrassing implausibilities which simply refuse to go away. Do the flaws look magnified because the film’s many virtues are so outstanding? If the whole of Saat Rang Ke Sapne was the usual average Hindi film, we might have overlooked the glitches but because the film is far superior, the flaws stand out glaringly.

As for the plot, you have an endearingly comic, confirmed old bachelor, Bhanu Pratap (Anupam Kher who once again spoils a good beginning with his mannered over-acting) and his faithful servitor Mahipal (Arvind Swamy makes a handsome Rajput). The relationship between them is not that of master and servant because Mahipal was raised in that household since he was four by the widowed Yashoda (Farida Jalal brings classy restraint to a rather hackneyed, weepy role). Yashoda, cheated out of her property by wicked in-laws, presides over her brother’s household and treats the young Mahipal as a substitute for the son we are told she had lost years ago. There is a lot of tomfoolery and camaraderie going on in this household — which looks like a shiny new showcase for ethnic chic — much of the foolery occasioned by Bhanu’s weakness for drink and drunken squabbles. Mahipal is the ace bullock cart driver who invariably wins the annual race against the arch enemy — Yashoda’s wicked sasural people — and covers up for his Bade Bhaiyya.

Into this bucolic life comes the flashy Jalima (Juhi Chawla) a nautanki dancer with whom both men fall in love — Bhanu almost at once and Mahipal, after a round of quarrelling and mutual exchange of uncomplimentary names. Priyadarshan takes the celebrated situation of a Hindi film classic — the flirtatious nautanki dancer and the susceptible bullock cart driver of Basu Bhattacharya’s Teesri Kasam — and wisely opts to subvert the delicacy with boisterous comedy. Eroticism blossoms in an enclosed space as the cart trudges on through the mysterious, magical night. It is a knowing and calculated eroticism because Jalima is not attracted to the middle-aged Bhanu but does not protest too strongly because it is in her self-interest to reach a safe destination. Through out, there is the comic element of Satish Shah’s drunken perorations (he is Jalima’s token guardian), Bhanu’s un-reciprocated overtures and Mahipal’s loud and continuous recriminations.

Jalima is the curious, unsettling element. She practically kidnaps Mahipal (misleads him into the loneliness of the jungle for a bit of jocular dalliance, she confesses). This willingness of the woman to be the wooer, albeit of a mischievous kind with no serious intent, is something new. Normally, we get a coy village belle whose seductions are supposedly unconscious. But after leading us to this fraught idyll, Priyadarshan spoils it all by having so-called Adivasis in a Rajasthan jungle speak Kannada, of all languages! What worked in Malayalam — Kerala and Karnataka share a border — is a totally laughable anachronism in a Hindi film. Is this yet another instance of a director’s contempt for his audience, in the name of lightweight entertainment?

After this gaffe, Saat Rang Ke Sapne fails to reclaim our total attention. Once you see this disrespect for your intelligence, it is difficult to respond wholeheartedly to the film however hard the director tries to please you with his craftsmanship. The whole business of the rift between Bhanu and Mahipal is engineered by a jealous servant (Govind Namdeo is a wily villain and he is so wicked that you end up liking him!). But it is far too contrived. The hitherto perky Jalima loses her spark once the meddlesome melodrama takes over and stretches to tedious length.

It is as if Priyadarshan is stuck with his ponderous script and to hide the logical loopholes, he tries to cover up with set piece songs (Nadeem-Shravan’s music is serviceable rather than memorable) and beautiful images. Even the way some of the songs are choreographed shows an eagerness to please with outlandish effects: the theme song has Juhi Chawla suddenly preen and pirouette in a Victorian dress, complete with a lacy parasol, alternating with the vibrant colours of the Rajasthani costumes. And Arvind Swamy prances around in two avatars — the regular turbaned dancer and a wild-eyed, wild-haired hunter-suitor who gets the bride. It looks rather silly though the obvious intention is to be flamboyantly dramatic.

Far more effective was the image which follows the first embrace of the lovers — beads from a broken necklace scatter on the ground and gleaming gold bangles do an intricate, slithering dance on the rocky slope before splashing gracefully into the river. It is a lovely lingering image which evokes descriptions of lovemaking in classical Sanskrit poetry (disarrayed jewels denote passionate lovemaking) and marries it to a contemporary idiom. This is the signature of the director which is missing from the rest of the film.