Rang Rasiya: Differently abled, like its artist

Rang Rasiya

Starring: Randeep Hooda, Nandana Sen, Triptha Parashar

Rated: 7.5/10

Both Ketan Mehta and his film Rang Rasiya are bold and beautiful. Based on the life and art of maverick painter of the 19th century, Raja Ravi Verma, this biopic comes with all the nuggets of emotionality, period drama and history fitting into each other as a Lego puzzle is meant to.

To start with, the very idea of making a film on this controversial painter is eclectic. Then to give it bold sexual overtones is audacious but well slotted. The world, till now, has bought Raja Ravi Verma’s paintings for several crores of rupees but is still in the womb of religious limitations, something that Mehta shows brilliantly by juxtaposing an art auction against mob fury.

The painter’s family is up in arms one hears, but once you sit down to view this film, you are swept away by the doctrines of life through which this eccentric painter lived and painted. He was a hero much ahead of his times, the first painter ever in India to think of prints, en masse art and mixing business with artistry.

He was also a man much beyond bigotry and social demarcations. He worshiped the human form as passionately as he worshiped his lines and colours on the canvas. He brought deities out of temples and sold them to common man for a few pennies. He created a furore but he also created undying, ageless, immortal art down the line.

Mehta’s film captures all this futurism, drama and turbulence beautifully through Randeep Hooda who almost merges into the life and times of Ravi Verma. The art director and costume designers of this visual treatise need an award for having captured the minutest detail of that bygone period with such finesse. Nandana Sen as Sugandha, Ravi Verma’s muse, overpowers you with her sublime beauty which was must for figuring her as a Goddess sometimes and an Urvashi at other times on Ravi Verma’s canvas. Their relationship has been handled with amazing balance of emotion and practicality climaxing in the killing dialogue in which she is told by her painter that she does not exist for him outside of his artistic imagination.

The undying note of this biopic is a high with everything — be it the politics or religion or social milieu of that time being on an exaggerated note. That exaggeration, however, fits into the high pitched existence of the master painter as finely as it blends in the strands of loyalty that he begets from his servant and brother, not to mention Dada Saheb Phalke, his first student of art.

Rang Rasiya is much more than a biopic. It is an engaging slice of history brilliantly portrayed by Mehta’s keen sense of cinematic art and historical drama. A must savour film that is differently abled, much like its central character. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 9 November, 2014