How Bhansali Elevates the First Encounter

An excerpt from a new book on the Hindi director considers the importance of first sightings in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's cinema

- Prathyush Parasuraman

In Bhansali's films, when lovers lay eyes on each other for the first time, or when the audience lays eyes on the characters, they are energized into being, a moment of grace. That, for him, is love. Destiny is involved. When you are granted darshan, it is as though all of your life was meandering towards this very moment—a sacred, irresistible cliché. It is the romantic bulwark against any existential fugue that frustrates one's purpose in life.

Love at first sight liberally peppers Bhansali's filmography. When Raj (Salman Khan) lays eyes on Annie (Manisha Koirala) in Khamoshi: The Musical for the first time, it is his animated rite of passage into the film. In Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, it is the fixed gaze of Nandini (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) on Sameer (Salman Khan) when they first sight each other, a chandelier with candles swaying in between them, creating this ephemeral barrier between the two strangers who would, over the course of the next hour, be stained in each other's reckless love.

Similarly, there is Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) holding the gaze of Sakina (Sonam Kapoor) for the first time in Saawariya as she is running away from a drunk heckler; Ram (Ranveer Singh) fixated, hypnotized by Leela (Deepika Padukone) the first time their eyes cross paths in Ram-Leela amid a spray of Holi colours and a burst of bullets. Whether love at first sight is a human possibility, a biological lunge, or whether it is a mimetic aspiration we have inherited from cinema, it is an emotionally, erotically dense moment invoking, unrolling, predicting the intensity of the journey that the lovers will now chart.