It is the beginning of the Diwali weekend in Bombay, and the city is bright and festive. This time around, however, the excitement has to do not just with crackers, mithai and new clothes, but also, in this film-crazy metropolis, the big movie releases of the weekend: Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariya. The former was produced by India's biggest contemporary star, Shahrukh Khan; the latter, co-produced by Sony Pictures Entertainment, was the first Indian film made by a Hollywood studio in India.
In many ways, the films promise to be more like each other than may at first seem apparent. They are quintessentially Bollywood: both are over the top, mainstream and steeped in Bollywood heritage. We have been reminded innumerable times of the legacies and lineages at play here: that actor Ranbir Kapoor comes from the fourth generation of Prithviraj Kapoor's family ("the 'first family' of Indian Cinema", declares the Saawariya website) and is the grandson of showman Raj Kapoor; that Sonam Kapoor is the daughter of established film star Anil Kapoor; and that Salman is the son of scriptwriter Salim Khan. We know, too, that choreographer Farah Khan grew up in Bollywood, where her father was a producer, her mother the sister of Honey and Daisy Irani, and that her brother is the comedian-turned-filmmaker Sajid Khan.
And yet, these two films also present two very different faces of Bollywood. While Om Shanti Om presents the self-reflexive, playful, witty side, full of broad humour and parody, Saawariya is in the doleful, serious, self-important, painted-canvas style that has increasingly become the hallmark of Bhansali's projects. The film is Bhansali's fifth work in a career that began with the sunlit Khamoshi and spanned the exoticised desert hues of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, the splashy period-Bengali reds of Devdas, and most recently the dark interiors of Black.
Saawariya is set in a blue-green fairytale world composed of floating flowers, quaint neon signs, spiral staircases, stained glass, pouring rain, flowing garments, glowing lamps, tinkling fountains, dusty carpets, fat candles and veiled faces. The claustrophobia begins even in the film's taglines: "Her world was the wait for love. His was the wait for her love." One night, itinerant singer Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor, who is the son of Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh) finds himself in a small town painted with a blue-green palette, where the prostitutes wait on street corners, where flamboyant Gulabji (Rani Mukherjee) watches the world pass by, and where an old woman named Lillianji (Zohra Sehgal) still pines for her lost son. After Raj sweet-talks himself out of spending the night with Gulabji and into boarding at crusty old Lillian's (whom he calls Lillypop), he suddenly spots a beautiful girl standing on a bridge, pensively twirling an umbrella over her head. This is Sakina (Sonam Kapoor), waiting at the bridge for her mysterious lover Imaan (Salman Khan), who is off somewhere working for the mulk, the country.