Gangubai Kathiawadi review – rousing Bollywood biopic with real star power

At times, the level of spectacle in Bollywood biopic Gangubai Kathwiadi offers such pure cinematic pleasure that one can easily and readily forgive many of the film’s underlying issues. Compared to the moribund, green-screened, cinematically illiterate entertainments coming out of that other big filmmaking capital of the world, one wonders why it’s so difficult to just make a film look like a damn film, with actors on screen moving and doing things, and directing, editing, and framing that tells you what’s going on.

All of the ideas present in Gangubai Kathwiadi – which tells the true life story of Mumbai underworld queen Gangubai Kothewali – are played in big, boisterous brushstrokes. But crucially, they're always told visually: through composition, blocking, acting, the very facts of what’s on screen. As a commercially-minded Bollywood blockbuster, with all the attendant details that that includes (a two-and-a-half hour runtime, musical interludes, moralistic messaging), the film does eventually lapse into generic platitudes, particularly in the last hour.

In this case, this is much of a hagiography of the real-life Gangubai, a brothel madam, originally trafficked into prostitution in the 1950s but who rose up through the ranks and advocated for the rights of sex workers in India. It's hard to say how much veracity lies in the film’s retelling of events, but it does feel distinctively one-sided, not that it matters. Here, Gangubai is played by Alia Bhatt, a super-powered star presence, allowed to command the film at every moment, mastering the shift from scared teen to dominant and charismatic leader. Where is this level of pure star power in today’s Hollywood?

The film is at its best when constructing scenes that are told through gesture and movement – images rather than dialogue. Nowhere is this more apparent than in one scene where Gangubai meets a prospective lover in the back of her car. The playback music starts, and Gangubai begins to tease, her mood shifting between yay and nay, the duo’s every facial expression and movement describing events all on their own. Shot in a single take, this works as exquisite silent cinema all on its own – a whole story with a beginning, middle and end. Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali finds similar moments elsewhere, too: a masochist’s comeuppance ends in him sliding off a car; a victory over a rival ends with Gangubai looming above us, feet up and full of self-confidence; a letter reaching out to one sex worker’s father becomes a letter to everybody’s father in overlapping voices.

The moments are most frequent in the film’s early stages, as Gangubai finds her feet. The second half putters out a bit, as the speechifying starts and the direction muddles into statically placing Gangubai against ever-increasingly larger crowds, sent out to deliver The Point of the film, repeated ad infinitum. The Point, in this case, is that women and sex workers should be treated with respect and dignity: not a bad message to impart, of course, but subtlety is not exactly this film’s strong suit, and it results in a final hour that’s increasingly dull and leaden. Still, it’s easy to forgive such mistakes when the first 90 minutes consists of such beautiful and visually engaging cinema.

Gangubai Kathwiadi is in UK cinemas from 25 February.