S. S. Rajamouli takes two real revolutionaries who never met, invents a friendship for them in Delhi, and stages the most exuberant action film in years around it. It is 187 minutes long, its villains are cardboard, and we enjoyed nearly all of it.
Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem were real men who fought the British in the early twentieth century and who never, as far as anyone knows, met. S. S. Rajamouli, working from a story by K. V. Vijayendra Prasad, decides that they did, in Delhi in 1920, and that they became friends without either knowing what the other was for. From that invention he builds 187 minutes of trains, dances and fistfights. It is the most exuberant action film we have seen in years. It is also forty minutes too long, its Englishmen are drawn in crayon and its India has room for two kinds of person. We recommend it warmly, for a cinema with a crowd in it.
The first meeting sets the standard. A train derails on a river bridge, a boy is stranded in the water among burning oil, and two strangers on opposite banks look at each other, agree a plan in a glance and carry it out with a rope, a horse, a motorbike and a flag. Senthil Kumar shoots it in late-afternoon gold and long slow motion so that you can follow every stage, and A. Sreekar Prasad cuts between the two faces so that we understand the plan before they have finished it. We laughed at the cheek of it. Then the two hands met in mid-air over the fire and we were moved, and we had not expected both from one shot.
M.M. Keeravaani’s music is the engine, and the songs are scenes, not breaks between them. The best is a dance at the Governor’s party, where a sneering Englishman informs Bheem that Indians know nothing of dancing and the two friends answer with a routine of such speed and stamp that the Europeans fall over trying to keep up. Sabu Cyril’s white-columned palace and Rama Rajamouli’s braces and shirtsleeves make the pair look like two labourers who have wandered into a Merchant Ivory film and taken it over. We grinned through the whole number. It is the only fight in the film in which nobody bleeds.
N.T. Rama Rao Jr. plays Bheem as a large, gentle man who fights like something let out of a cage, and he is the film’s heart. When he cannot find Malli, his face does the grieving the script is too busy for. Ram Charan gives Raju a straight back and a shut face, and his is the harder job, because Raju spends the first half doing his masters’ work and the film needs us to keep faith. Their scenes together, riding side by side or eating in the street, are why the film works: two men who like each other so much the plot has to prise them apart. Ray Stevenson’s Governor and Alison Doody’s Cassandra are villains from a Victorian melodrama, all sneer and lace, and the film wants them that way. Olivia Morris’s Jenny is warm and has nothing to do but be kind, and Alia Bhatt’s Sita has three scenes.
The length is felt. A montage of friendship is followed by a second that says the same thing. Every punch in the second half is filmed from three angles when one would do. The digital work is uneven: fire and water are excellent, crowds are not, and the more the film asks of its computers the rubberier the result. And the politics are as simple as the villains. The British are monsters, the two men are close to gods, and nobody in between has a name. We were stirred more than once, and once or twice uneasy about how cheaply we had been stirred.
Set against Rajamouli’s own Baahubali films, this is the more disciplined work: the story is smaller, the stakes are personal and the fights have consequences. Set against what Hollywood currently calls an action film, it is a rebuke. There is not a set-piece here in which you cannot say where everyone is standing. Most critics have placed it higher than we have; they were happier than we were to forgive the length.
See it in a cinema if you can, with as many people as the place holds. At home, do what the film asks and stop at the interval to put the kettle on. It was built for a break, and by that point so were we.
