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BEDROOM EYES:
Devdas is overflowing with beauty and music
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| 2002: Best and worst |
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There's a lot of junk out there. But once a year we celebrate the sublime. And make fun of the junk
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By RICHARD CORLISS |
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Posted Sunday, Dec. 30, 2002; 2.02 p.m.
GMT
>>> DEVDAS,
directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, India
For ages, Indian popular cinema seemed to outsiders as remote as Pluto. Now everyone wants to visit Planet Bollywood. The gaudy three-hour excess of wild melodrama mixed with orgasmic song-and-dance numbers is a tonic in an age when most European films speak in an emotional monotone. And there's no more colorful introduction to Bollywood than Devdas: the most expensive local film ever and the year's biggest Indian hit. The plot, based on a 1917 novel, is good-old family-values propaganda: rich boy (all-world charmer Shahrukh Khan, pictured above) leaves home, abandons girl friend (former Miss World Aishwarya Rai), dallies with prostitute (worldly-wise Madhuri Dixit), suffers dreadfully. And nobly. It's played with such commitment that the tritest plot twists seem worth believing — and singing about, in nine nifty production numbers. Beyond that, Devdas is a visual seduction, with huge sets, fabulous frocks and beautiful people to fill them; it has a grandeur the old Hollywood moguls would have loved. True, the movie was partly financed by a notorious mobster ... but that's part of the Bollywood mystique too.
 >>> HERO,
Zhang Yimou, China
A starry cast (Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Zhang Ziyi) lends glamorous gravity to a Rashomon- like fable of action and passion among would-be assassins of China's first emperor. The fight scenes are thrilling, the color design ravishing. And when Cheung and Leung, the warrior-lovers, finally settle their scores, viewers see one of the most startling, poignant farewells in film history.
 >>> RUSSIAN ARK,
Alexander Sokurov, Russia
This could have been just an elaborate cinematic stunt — a single, 87-min. Steadicam shot that pirouettes through the Hermitage Museum to give us a tour of its artistic treasures and to encapsulate three centuries of Russian history — but because Sokurov is as much an artist as a technician, viewers can forget the degree of difficulty in this mammoth logistical challenge and concentrate on the cast of thousands playing out their dramas, leading to a coda that will leave the moviegoer gasping in exhilarated exhaustion and wondering, "What's the Russian word for 'Wow!'?"
 >>> TALK TO HER,
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
Movie-making sends more young phenoms into early burnout than Olympic gymnastics. But Almodóvar defies the odds: the quirky melodramas of this one-time bad boy get better, richer, deeper. Talk to Her is about two young women, each in a coma, and the two men who love them. Where does devotion end and obsession take over? How can violation beget a miracle? Pedro has all the answers in this unpredictable miracle of a movie.
 >>> GANGS OF NEW YORK,
Martin Scorsese, U.S.
He's been dreaming of this project since 1970. Now the dream — which, being a Scorsese film, is an urban nightmare — comes true, in a teeming tale of Anglo gangs vs. new Irish immigrants in 1863. Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio nurse their rivalry within a huge fresco of greed, ambition, betrayal and skull-cracking hatred. What did those roiling emotions create? The American city. And, here, a grand and brutal epic.
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