Guzaarish

There is no doubting Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s superb sense of aesthetics, but he reduces the issue of euthansia to a TV show debate.

There is no doubting Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s superb sense of aesthetics, but he reduces the issue of euthansia to a TV show debate.

Like Spanish painters of the 17th and 18th century, Sanjay Leela Bhansali is obsessed, in Guzaarish, with portraits of aristocracy and depictions of Christ. Goa is the perfect setting for both. So he hauls his post-modern royalty—Hindi movie stars—to the land of the resting place of St Francis Xavier. With the help of cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee, he turns the central character in the film, a magician called Ethan Mascarenhas, into Jesus.
From the first scenes in the film we see Ethan laid out on a table in a loincloth, being bathed by his nurse Sophia, then raised upright and strapped with his arms outstretched, as in the crucifixion. He is bearded and long haired, has a beatific air about him, and though often impatient with his support staff of nurse, doctor and lawyer, treats them with benediction.

Ethan is paraplegic after an accident during a show when a fellow magician sabotaged him—a Judas who is shown in one scene admitting his guilt and being forgiven by Ethan. Bhansali paints his movie exquisitely, has worked hard at his palette, but, as usual, has set it in a world far removed from a single point of cultural reference for his audience.

Though possessed of a supreme sense of aesthetics, Bhansali is not a very original thinker and frequently derives his ideas from popular sources. Even so, Guzaarish is about an important subject, the need for our judiciary to re-examine the possibility of medically supervised euthanasia. In a dramatic court scene held at his own home, Ethan (Hrithik Roshan) performs a magic trick for the judge.

He asks the prosecutor to get into a box and shuts the lid for 60 seconds. The man is suffocated and desperately tries to free himself, while Ethan explains to the judge that as a paraplegic, this is the claustrophobia he must suffer for the rest of his life.

It remains a paradox that the film is watchable, even as it sentimentalises an issue that should never be sentimentalised. Ethan’s world is cosy and there is no cruelty in his universe. A sweet mother (Nafisa Ali), an efficient nurse (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), an ex-lover/wife without bitterness (Monikangana Dutta), a lawyer who argues his case with heart (Shernaz Patel) and a doctor with soul (Suhel Seth), censor, for the audience, his real suffering.
What you end up seeing is a TV debate on euthanasia with celebrities weighing in with their opinions and a make-believe judge, lawyer and prosecutor, as in the show Aap Ki Adalat.

Bhansali blurs the difference between pain, an unpleasant business that popular audiences shrink from, and melodrama, which is his forte. In a sense, of course, this is the problem with any Hindi film that attempts to tackle serious issues for a popular audience. But the difference here is a sense of regret felt, because the director of Guzaarish actually possesses interesting visual designs that could, if he collaborated well with an original writer, translate into fascinating cinema.

But that is neither here nor there. Goa, in the rains, has never been more beautiful. A beard and long hair suits Hrithik and turns him into an exceedingly handsome man with arresting screen presence. The scenes where he does magic are magical because they are not performed like tricks, but choreographed like dance. In short, Guzaarish is like taking a leisurely walk through the corridor of an art gallery. As the poem goes:
‘In the room, the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo’.

GuzaarishSanjay Leela Bhansali