| Grass and the sets of Devdas has something akin to themselves. Grand feeling , grander flights of fancy. I remember exactly the thin demarcation of realism and fantasy when one see the song dola re dola where the two lead heroines dance their asses out, after half a dozen rounds of coarse grass bought from Powai (I wont tell you the place)!!! Most of the time, in your dazed condition you cant differentiate Madhuri from Ash. But the best mirages are those wherein you feel Madhuri rotating with Ash as the axis or vice versa. Or Ash climbing on Madhuri (For some grotesque juxtaposition of female flesh immured in 9 yards of silk) and the ephemeral feeling of absence of all human forms in the glitter of gold and the heavily laid sarees….and the mysticism of yellow lights… Then your mind’s camera go for a long shot as you fly over the menagerie of dancing bodies below you. There are points of chaos among the Seconds with the two leads spinning and gyrating as if God is playing a kids game using the leads as gyros. Another round of well rolled grass and either you join the two leads wearing lovely glittering golden laced kurtas and sherwanis and become part of the larger scheme of things. Settling into their rhymes and gyrations and becoming one with them. Three become one. Or if you are not in one of those high highs , you may as well join the chaos of the Background dancers, as the camera touches down to showcase your naked navels. Few more rounds and that is when you realize the surrealism of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. You are not part of the grandiose. You are apart from it. You go up in your horizons. You look down. Things are at first yellow lights, leads are no longer differentiated from the seconds, all become one. They are not entities , they are merely particles constituting the yellow swirls. Then the yellow dissolves into the darkness of black and you go higher up. Above Bengal and the bay and the world. Cut…….. |
| Dope and Dola |