Baahubali is an epic film from Indian cinema that tells the story of Shivudu, who as a child was saved from death by being found by a villager near a waterfall and being raised by her until he was older, always wanting to know what is behind the waterfalls despite the pleas of his mother and prayers to his deity, who by the way has his statue located in the waterfalls by his son when he pulled it out of its place of origin with his strength.
He embarks on a mission to see what lies beyond the waterfalls, having climbed such places since he was a child, but it is not until the figure of a woman guides him, looking like a ghost, that he finally finds the way to find his love, who is a warrior seeking to free the queen of Mahishmati, who has been a prisoner in that place for 25 years.
After trying to woo the warrior, Shivudu discovers her past and travels to Mahishmati to free the queen, managing to escape with her, only to be overtaken by royal troops on the way in the rain.
He would finally defeat the evil king who held the queen captive and reveal to his most loyal servant everything that had happened. He gave details of how a battle to save the kingdom changed the destiny of two brothers who were fighting for the throne forever and then the events that would lead to the present moment would be unleashed.
However, the story continues. And in this last part, it is revealed that Shivudu is Bahubali who would free the people from the tyranny of the evil ruler they had.
The film is epic. It has great battles, a good story, a good plot and special effects, as well as good acting. It has nothing to envy of the big Hollywood productions and the story is extremely interesting. It is the most ambitious film in terms of production, quality and budget in Indian cinema, as far as we know so far and it is very well done.
The story is based on a classic archetype of fantasy narration - the child unaware of his own power who is destined for greatness and has the task of defeating evil. At the same time it blends the Indian iconographic tradition into a spectacular action movie in which a plurality of stylistic elements deriving from different Western cinematographic genres coexist in full agreement.
There are extremely clear references to The Lord of the Rings in the battle scenes, to peplum and to historical films from the 50s and 60s, all mixing romance, love and betrayal, valor and cowardice in a narrative, aesthetic and visual overaccumulation that goes beyond kitsch to become, as in all great Indian popular cinema, a true stylistic figure.
This pair of films is so little interested in the great fresco and the great plot that ties everything together, that in the end you understand what the real center of the story is halfway through the second film, that is, more or less when three and a half hours have passed. This is because the division between the two chapters is crazy. I haven't explained anything to you yet, I realize, but it's important for you to understand that the story begins in the present, with Bahubali the son (i.e. Mahendra), and then halfway through the first film there is a flashback (the story of Bahubali the father, i.e. Amarendra) during which the film ends.
Two years later, Baahubali 2 was released, which picks up from within the flashback and, in the very last part, returns to the present. So, although the first film dwells a lot on the present and the events of Bahubali's son. Halfway through the second we understand that the point of everything is the story in the past, that of the father. For this alone I applaud. Why go and make millions of rupees with a structure like that! But what can you do?
Now that I have at least revealed the structure to you, to orient you, I repeat that the most important thing remains Bahubali's hair. We are not in a detective story this time, we are not in a period film, we are in a fantasy that is rooted in popular Jain myths. So if you thought that stuff was a bit exaggerated, imagine this one that is a mythical epic, that deals with figures like demigods.
I don't even come close to trying to understand the actual status of the characters but let's say that they manage to do things that in the West we usually attribute to demigods. To this I add that Bahubali means the one with the strong arms.
The most important thing in both films of the Baahubali saga is the hair. By far the most important. It is the single detail of the staging that the two films pay the most attention to and the one that reveals a bit of everything there is to know. In particular (obviously) the hair of Bahubali himself, both Amarendra Bahubali and his son Mahendra Bahubali (played by the same actor, because otherwise it would have been easy).
Imagine a wuxia pian but with a rule of cool a million times more exaggerated. A wuxia pian that says "Yes but let's not feel anchored to realism eh!" and that only thinks about how exceptional its characters are, what a damn hair they have!
It all starts with Bahubali (son) who as a newborn is saved by his mother (we will understand how and why two films later) who dives into a river after falling from a waterfall and holds him above the water. She is underwater, but he is held with one hand on the surface for as long as he can. The mother is already dead underwater when they find him but she still held her son on the surface while the current dragged them. There, like that.
Bahubali grows up with his strong arms in a country village at the foot of the waterfall where he does things like move gigantic weights and then dance for the satisfaction of having done it and both are displays of virility . When he discovers that he comes from above the waterfall, he does everything to climb it, thus managing to meet a warrior woman with whom he engages in a sentimental relationship, made of dances, songs and tender tattoos made to her underwater while she sleeps.
Or in a confrontation between the two, while she tries to kill him, he (who is still Bahubali), instead of fighting her avoids her and in the meantime changes her clothes and modifies her makeup to make her more feminine, so that when she finally looks at herself in the water she remains there and understands that it is better this way (as you can imagine they are not exactly films in which the relationships and positions of the sexes are like in ours).
In short, this is Bahubali (son), a lover who discovers the world, at least until he comes into contact with war and battles, at which point an elderly fighter tells him how he himself killed his father. AND ON TO THE FLASHBACK.
If in the present everything was exaggerated in the past I won't even tell you. I won't summarize, we're talking about giant statues, tamed bulls and evil brothers, threatening kingdoms, armies and then more and more, in a continuous relaunch of a clearly insufficient computer graphics (but here the visual effects continually throw the heart over the obstacle) up to a final clash (of the first film) truly sensational with impressive numbers of digital extras that are clearly modeled on a single character and therefore all move together in the same way.
If up to that point the film has been absurd but not exactly exciting, the ending is really the great reward, stuff that in some ways has never been seen before for ambition and then images actually sensational centered. The real satisfaction.
How to surpass it in the sequel? For example by having Bahubali (father) enter the scene while pushing immense carts and at the end of the first big action sequence (with elephants) he stands on top of a rearing elephant with his phenomenal hair blowing in the wind.
However, like all sequels, Bahubali 2 is not Bahubali 1. It increases everything because the success was crazy, it increases the tackiness a lot (but the great SS Rajamouli does not improve the computer graphics, because he remembers where he comes from) for all this long flashback in the pomp, set in the mythical kingdoms of the past above the waterfall and not in the present under the waterfall.
Of course, if the wuxia plan focuses everything on harmony and a sensational delicacy, even in the most furious fight sequences, Bahubali actually focuses everything on an excessive sense of epic, made of increasingly gigantic weapons, senseless decisions and moved by an out of scale emphasis.
From the front holes it then shoots like a million arrows all at once in all directions. But what is it? What kind of vehicle is it? Who designed it? It seems to have come from the imagination of an 8 year old child.
If wuxia is light even in heaviness, Bahubali is always very heavy even when it wants to tell the lightness. There will be flying fights followed by dances, there will be giant whips to give each other on the teeth made of gold and with diamonds plated inside, but also a fist fight in which each one has wrapped around his forearms 40 kilos of chain. All so much that in the end for the final blow, the one in which all the emphasis of four and a half hours of story is concentrated, they will really have to disturb this world and that other one.
In the face of all this, it is therefore evident that SS Rajamouli has a sensational inventiveness, which holds up four and a half hours by relaunching, creating, expanding his story, inserting a thousand characters played by the same actors and giving each one shots of such naive coolness but also so undoubtedly powerful that it is really difficult to remain indifferent.
He is without a doubt a creator of images. We can struggle to enter 100% into the structures or to understand how a moment of great strength can go together with a ballet immediately after, but there are things that are universal. And when I speak of universal things, I mean a gigantic, golden lion's face, behind the throne of the most evil of all.
The music of the film is composed by MM Keeravani, cousin of the director SS Rajamouli and as per tradition it is a situational soundtrack, whose words and sound impact describe the moment of the film in which the song is placed. The original Indian version and the international version differ from each other only in the use of the musical pieces inserted within the film.
Despite being pure entertainment of easy accessibility, Baahubali is certainly produced at a technical level that does not look out of place compared to its Western blockbuster counterparts, managing to fully fulfill the mission for which it is intended: to entertain.
Rhythm and choreography as per the tradition of Indian cinema are the strong points of a film that sometimes renounces rigorous narrative coherence to make itself fascinating and captivating in its visual strength.
Gigantism in the sets supported by massive doses of computer graphics; an almost constant use of slow motion. Emphatic poses in ecstatic shots, are the indelible signs of a show that goes beyond imagination and crushes the culture of subtraction with the naive freshness of enthusiasm.
The final forty-five minutes of the battle that pave the way for the second part of the story, represent an exhilarating climax contextualized in a fascinating wild scenario.
