Critics’ Verdict: Ranveer Rules a Mesmerising ‘Bajirao Mastani’

Check out how critics are reacting to Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone’s ‘Bajirao Mastani’

Film: Bajirao Mastani
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Cast: Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Tanvi Azmi

Bajirao Mastani is faithful to the genre. It is replete with grandiloquent and idiomatic dialogue, eye-watering sets and costumes, a rousing background score, elaborately choreographed songs, and the general pomp that is associated with pre-colonial India. Bhansali controls his tendency towards hyperbolic drama that has stymied so many of his productions, but he lets go of the reins in the melodramatic climax, which botches up the evenly-paced and sober narrative and further reduces Bajirao’s status from love-struck general to a Don Quixote-like figure, tilting at the windmills of his fevered imagination. Ranveer Singh invests Bajirao with grace, agility, sensuality and purpose, and he powerfully conveys his character’s tragedy and loss. Bajirao may have lost the war in his home, but Singh’s performance is an unmistakable triumph.

Nandini Ramnath (Scroll.in)

A couple of the musical set pieces do not ring true in a historical epic about a man whose place in history is primarily as an unvanquished general.These are but minor aberrations in a sweeping love story that is mounted on such a grandiose scale and crafted with such vaulting zeal that eventually the smaller details cease to matter. Bajirao Mastani is, in many respects, Bhansali’s most subversive film to date. Its central message is that all religions preach love but love has no religion. Despite its failings, Bajirao Mastani is the work of a director who never shies away from going the whole hog. Even when Bhansali isn’t in full flight, he still manages to soar well above the mundane.Bajirao Mastani is for those that think history is boring. There isn’t a dull moment in this colourful and dramatic film that embraces excess with unabashed abandon.

Saibal Chatterjee (Movies.ndtv.com)

The elements are all the there: pain, angst, art, unattainable love, rebellion, melodrama, perfect beauty in the detailing... and above all the inevitable, eternal triangle. Bajirao Mastani may as well be the third in the trilogy of triangle love stories after Devdas and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. The hysterics, the drama, the ultra ornate look; all magnified and mounted with a brilliant background score which is like the Opera during the climax; come together in Bajirao Mastani. The climax peaks like the Opera, which is very reminiscent of Devdas, takes over with complete, awe inspiring, cinematic brilliance in ‘bewaqt ki baarish’. The film leaves you with Kashi’s pain instead of Bajirao and Mastani’s, which is the real tragedy in storytelling here.Bhansali’s Mughal-e-Azam may not be perfect but is a memorable, mesmerizing and dazzling piece of cinematic vision.

Gayatri Gauri (Firstpost.com)