Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Baahubali 2: the Conclusion. OK. Some confessions first. I love costume drama. Sword and sandal. Victorian England. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Gone With the Wind. Ben Hur. Movies like that. Or, television shows, too, for that matter. No, I don’t like them all, but when a movie combines a compelling story with the recreation of a period of time, I’m there.
I also love foreign films not made for an export market. In other words, I enjoy seeing how filmmakers and writers from other cultures choose to tell stories within their own cultural idioms. Seeing these and reading novels written and loved in a particular place, not the U.S., is the moral equivalent of traveling for me and I do all of these as often as I can.
I’ve also come to enjoy for its own sake the peculiar Bollywood film-making style. Technically, Baahubali is not Bollywood made, but it is in the Bollywood style. That style inevitably includes several elaborate song and dance numbers, often coming at odd junctures in the story, at least odd to this mountain man raised in the Midwest.
So, for me Baahubali was a perfect storm. Set in some mythic era of India, in the state of Mahishmati, a real ancient city, but here represented as the ultimate utopia, there are court scenes, love scenes, song and dance scenes, hunting scenes, battle scenes all elaborately produced and choreographed. Yes, the acting is often very broad, but this is not realism, it’s fantasy. There is also plenty of humor.
Though it was three hours long, the film never dragged, moving from one intense moment to another. One beautiful scene, the most fantastic, found a swan shaped ship sailing through the clouds as the two doomed lovers, Baahubali and Devasena, stood Titanic-like, at the prow.
There is a thoughtful review from the Indian entertainment press with which I largely agree. In essence the reviewer says the movie was a visual treat and thrilling, very watchable. But. It didn’t grab the heart, leave memorable characters or ideas behind. A glorious ephemera.
True that. Even so, it’s still worth seeing if you share even some of my cinematic quirks: love of costume dramas, a desire to see how other cultures express themselves in film, a jones for beautifully clad, colorful choreography and Indian musical vocals.
