"I was hunting a deer, and shot a lion,” Padmavati tells her husband Ratan Singh on their wedding night, seconds before a Peeping Tom ruins their intimate embrace. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s grand spectacle Padmaavat is interspersed with such corny, filmy moments, which relieve the massive burden the film is stressing under.

Idiotic controversy aside — which I won’t go into for its utter lack of relevance to the film — Padmaavat is a rousing, if slightly overlong, epic of a gorgeous, intelligent princess who marries a Rajput king and becomes his latest go-to wife (the king already had another wife). Word of her beauty gets to an immoral, barbaric-looking conquest-hungry Muslim king who sacrifices troops, rations and many, many months just to catch a glimpse of her. When he is outsmarted by the Rajput queen, the Muslim king launches a massive siege on the Rajput kingdom, razing it to the ground. However, before he can get to her — spoiler alert — the queen walks into fire, immolating herself and dozens of other women. The poor barbaric king still fails to get a glimpse of the woman he had waged war for.

This Shakespearean-sounding period piece comes courtesy of a 1540 AD poem written by Malik Muhammad Jayasi, based loosely on a real life event that happened in the 1300s. As with most adaptations, Jayasi’s poem took creative liberties, adding stupefying (at times supernatural) exaggerations to history. Bhansali and co-writer Prakash Kapadia try to streamline the film version, cutting down the poem’s hyperboles to digestible story turns, in a fantasy-esque setting. Deepika Padukone and Shahid Kapoor (as Padmavati and Ratan Singh) look good on screen, even though they are mere caricatures of what the film needs them to be: stirringly noble, unwisely brave and imprudently prideful Rajput royalty. In short, the good guys you should be rooting for.

Padmaavat is a rousing, if slightly overlong, epic about a gorgeous, intelligent princess who opts for death over dishonour

Instead of them and their shining elegance — brought about by smartly lit sets, picture-perfect songs flaunting regal silk dresses and boldly designed ornaments — we fall for the barbarian ruler, Allaudin Khilji. In cinematic connotation, Bhansali’s version is vividly black and white in its portrayal of good and bad, and Khilji (played by Ranveer Singh as a swaggering, mascara-eyed sociopath) is as bad as any comic book villain ought to be. Khilji laughs like a megalomaniac and dances like a drunk Russian Czar (the Khalibali song is shrewdly choreographed that way) to emphasise his menace.

On the night of his wedding he is seen philandering with the palace maids, and later kills his uncle Jalaluddin (Raza Murad) so that he can ascend the throne. Khilji’s motives are inadequate, despite the manic allure Singh puts into the role, but who cares when the actor is having this much fun!

Historically, Khilji and the Muslims weren’t like this. The portrayal is harsh, but given Bhansali’s overemphasising tone bifurcating the morally right from the tyrannically insane, there is little to get angry about. Religion is a secondary concern to Bhansali, even though the Hindus are shown as the paragons of virtue. As the disclaimer before the film clearly states, this is a work of fiction, so enjoy it as a movie.

Published in Dawn, ICON, February 4th, 2018