Subhash K Jha speaks about Raanjhanaa

  This enormously-enriching film about the pain of love has four heroes: Dhanush, Sonam Kapoor, A R Rahman's music and the city of Varanasi. Not necessarily in that order. But then 'orderly conduct' is hardly a given in a film about raging unrequited love.

He loves her to death. Cross his heart and hope to die. And it's their wedding day. But they're not getting married to one another. As he returns exhausted from messing up her marriage to another man, the slumbering band-baaja wallahs at his own wedding hasten awake and begin playing a wedding song wearily.

It's a brilliant defiant moment defining the contradictions and savage ironies of romantic associations.

Raanjhanaa tells us, it is not so cool to fall in love. Unless you're ready to slither on the ground for love, if the need arises.

Ever wondered why we FALL and not rise in love? Just looking at Aanand Rai's unforgettable dazzling and non-derivative take on unrequited love set amidst the bustling river-bank politics of Varanasi, we know all over again that love can kill your spirit, soul, self-esteem and finally your physical presence as well.

Towards the end when the film's obsessive Majnu has lost everything, there is one of the many powerfully-written scenes where the very-talented Swara Bhaskara playing a loud aggressively besotted suitor-in-waiting tells her on-screen Soutan, "That isn't my man dying inside. My man would never be spitting blood."

Angry, aggressive, passionate, temperamental, moody and quite simply majestic Raanjhanaa is an opulent epic seductive raging and rippling ode to love. The script (written by Himanshu Sharma) journeys from the lover-boy Kundan's childhood when he first sees his object of adoration doing her namaaz, and follows him to adulthood, much in the same way as he follows Zoya around with .

In seductive spirals of song-filled rhapsody we see Kundan pursuing his lady-love through the robust gallis and mohallahs of Varanasi. It's a beautifully charted journey, much less foul-mouthed and belligerent than Habib Faisal's Ishaqzaade and far more mature and relevant than Ayan Mukerjee's Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, and made vastly enjoyable by the director's confident and unhurried control over his lover's uncontrollable passion. It's as though Rai knows that the heart is more prone to betrayal than redemption.

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