The Badass Beginning

The opening scene of Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) is  a marvel of compressed storytelling, like Grant Morrison's famous one page origin for Superman: Fallen city.  Desperate grandmother.  Raging river.  Kindly couple.  And the movie doesn't linger on the aftermath, either.  Shivutu (Prabhas), the baby saved by the aforementioned kindly couple, promptly grows up, moves a lingam (which establishes that he loves his adoptive mother, doesn't mind bending the rules, and has superhuman strength), finds a discarded wooden mask, then climbs an unclimbable mountain in search of the mask's owner.  The entire climbing sequence is stunningly beautiful, and at the end Shivu finds himself on a hidden plateau, in his ancestral land of KryptonMahishmati.

And there's still no time to linger.  The mask belongs to Avanthika (Tamaannah Bhatia), a badass member of a secret guerilla army dedicated to rescuing captive queen Devasena (Anushka Shetty) from the clutches of the evil usurper Bhallaladeva (Rana Bagubatti.)  Shivu wins Avanthika's heart through his mastery of stealth tattooing, and takes on her mission.  All the while, people keep calling him Baahuballi, but there's no time to dwell on the mystery, as all the main players have to be in place for . . . a climactic flashback, narrated by the enslaved warrior Kattappa.  This is only part one, after all.

You don't see a lot of heroic fantasy in Indian cinema; the only example I can think of offhand is Once Upon a Warrior, and that skews a lot closer to Willow than to Lord of the Rings.  Much more common is what is called a mythological, a movie based on one of the great Hindu religious epics.  There are still heroes and villains and massive armies, but instead of magic you have feats of inhuman martial prowess and supernatural powers granted through years of penance.  And the Baahubali movies remix this tradition in the same way that Western fantasy tends to remix Tolkien and Howard; instead of the crafty barbarian and the stout dwarf and the wise wizard, you have the cousins competing fro the throne, the royal advisor twisted in mind and body, the unshakably loyal warrior, and the captive queen sustained through her trials by the force of her rage.  It's a heady and impressive brew.

I do have an issue with The Beginning, though, and that is Avanthika's character arc.  In the old blog, I used to talk about the Sari Point, which is the point in a movie at which the romantic relationship has been established, and the heroine, who up to this point has been wearing modern and sometimes skimpy clothing, spends the rest of the movie in traditional Indian dress.  That's usually not a bad thing, but Avanthika gets Sari Pointed so hard - at the beginning of the movie she's a fierce and skilled warrior, but by the end, she's given all that up to become a full time Love Interest.