Prathyush Parasuraman’s new book decodes Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s mood board in cinema

Who knows beauty better than Sanjay Leela Bhansali? Prathyush Parasuraman’s new book gives a glimpse into how the auteur sees the world, one frame at a time

It is the image of Paro’s white sari with the red border, [the laal-par saree of Bengalis] unfurling as she runs towards Devdas who is breathing his last,” Prathyush Parasuraman tells us when we ask him about the first image that impressed upon him the force of ineffable beauty he recognised in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema. A cultural critic and journalist, with a BA in economics and South Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley, Parasuraman is the author of On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali (Ebury Press), a new book that delves deep into the notions of beauty that brings Bhansali’s cinema equal amounts of praise and censure. “If you pause the frame—and I realise this is not how people watch or should watch movies—the sari looks sculpted by air itself. It is a beauty that is so forceful, I keep wondering if what I am drawn to is the easy beauty of that frame, or the emotional heat with which she is running. Do I care for her longing, or am I merely content with the performance of it?” 

Much of his writing in the book pivots on questions of “beauty”, reflecting on that which can move as opposed to that which exists in and of itself. “Can beauty be so pungent that it overwhelms the emotional core? Or, put differently, can beauty be the emotional core?” asks Parasuraman. 

To Prathyush Parasuraman, the image of Paro’s laal-par sari unfurling in the climax of Devdas bore the force of an ineffable feeling of beauty

The book is divided into chapters dedicated to Bhansali’s movies, such as Khamoshi: The Musical; and Devdas, which the author identifies as the “inflection point, towards a more governed gorgeousness”. “A beauty,” he writes,  “that is produced invasively” as compared to, for instance, the comparatively less control exerted on the frames of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. The book also delves into Saawariya, his first film shot entirely indoors where his ‘khwabon ka sheher’, was deemed “too beautiful, too indulgent, too artificial” and Gangubai Kathiawadi, where even Alia Bhatt’s casting is shown as typical of brazen, subversive choices Bhansali has routinely made. 

The idea was to write a monograph and not a biography or a “making of” of the films, Parasuraman tells us. While his work with the online film platform, Film Companion, enabled the slow gathering of interviews about the director, the book, which took a year to write, was driven by a sense of certainty the author has felt since the idea first took hold. “I sort of had to muscle this book into existence,” he says, “It was written entirely in the cracks of the day, on the train to work, in between meetings, outside bars, etc. If something struck me, I immediately transcribed it. Many times, I lost my thoughts. The book sedimented that way. I don’t think in terms of difficulty-ease, but in terms of inevitability. It just had to happen.”

Parasuraman’s new book unpacks the art, ideas and perceptions behind the images of beauty in  Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s works. Pic/Getty Images

Parasuraman tracks and identifies some of the distinctive features of the auteur’s cinema, listing—besides his well-known predilection for imbuing an entire film with shades of one dominant colour—elements such as moments of emotional violence, and technical preferences for the top shot and the long shot as identifiable aspects of his unique style. Which of his sumptuous long shots is the author’s favourite, we ask. “It has to be the uninterrupted 60 seconds when Alia Bhatt as Gangubai goes in a trance at the fag end of Dholida. That signals a rupture. There is something clumsy about the way the sari swings; when she reaches towards a plate of gulaal to fling it, she misses it—there is a graceless grasping. If you think of perfection in composition as typically Bhansali, here is an example of him turning away from it. To see a director turn away from themselves, not entirely, but at a slight angle, is always thrilling.”

But are these notions and implications of filmic beauty unique to Bhansali? Parasuraman cites filmmaker Payal Kapadia as an example of another artist whose works could be viewed with the same lens of beauty he applies to Bhansali. For the author, in spite of the political reading of her films, Kapadia and her cinematographer Ranabir Das have often, like Bhansali, given the mundane the treatment of the extraordinary. “In A Night Of Knowing Nothing, for example,” he points out, “with all that violent, heart-breaking footage of police violence, the one image I am drawn to is of a tablecloth that we don’t see initially in the monochrome frame but then with a breeze, it catches the light and looks suddenly like something is lit on fire,” the author notes. 

Prathyush Parasuraman. Pic/Kush Patel

“Even with All We Imagine As Light, which I have watched thrice now, I keep pressing up against the way the tubelight looks like someone rubbed chalk on skin, how the golden earrings the women wear always catch the light, even at night, the wet underbelly of the lip, the metal bars on the train that when hit by light look like light has cut into them.”

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