If you’re expecting big, massy moments laden with oversaturated colors, violence, and drama from Prashanth Neel’s new movie Salaar, you’re in for a treat. However, the whistles and the hoots come at a dear cost—Salaar: Part 1 — Ceasefire is a painfully indulgent slow burn; it exhausts your patience almost entirely before it decides to reward you.
Headlined by a smoldering, hulking Prabhas, at its core, Salaar is the story of two childhood friends Deva (Prabhas) and Vardha (Prithviraj Sukumaran) who reunite after years of separation to claim what is rightfully theirs. Written by Neel, it is set in the dystopian fictional kingdom of Khansaar, in which warlords of different tribes hungering for absolute power are waiting to explode. In its history and detail, this first installment is rich and layered in a very Game of Thrones way.
There are several clans and their leaders, sons waiting to be coronated, ploys, secrets, and bloodbaths that are just as gruesome and gory.
But in its structure, Salaar: Part 1 — Ceasefire is more like Baahubali: The Beginning. It devotes itself entirely to constructing the lawless and violent world of Khansaar, teasing, building up to everything that the second part will unleash.
However, SS Rajamouli’s storytelling was more coherent, easy to follow, and therefore, a lot more engaging. Neel, meanwhile, comes across as overconfident and overindulgent—he throws events and characters at you without giving their backstory. Throughout the first half, he keeps handing you disparate pieces of a perplexing puzzle. You don’t know what to do with them because he refuses to let you in on the big picture. It’s only after halftime that he lifts the curtain to reveal a dazzling, long-drawn spectacle. But by then, you’re too weary and desensitised to care.
Salaar is a celebration of Prabhas the way Baahubali was and none of his movies ever since could be. But it is Prithviraj who steals the show here. He plays Vardha with a studied restraint, a simmering rage that you know could burn down entire armies. Neither Prabhas nor Prithviraj are given much to say in the film. They are so busy tearing flesh in slow motion and decapitating with choreographed flourish, that on the rare occasions when they do speak, it feels jarring.
The women do what we have come to expect them to in Neel’s films. Shruti Haasan’s character is so woefully underwritten that I can’t even recall her name. She has little to be except a wide-eyed deer in the headlights. The same goes for Easwari Rao, who plays Deva’s steely, long-suffering mother who wants him to steer clear of violence and spends her time trying to educate the unruly children of the local miners in Assam’s Tinsukia where they are living in hiding.
She also feeds boys and grown men off her hands every chance the film will let her. Finally, there’s Sriya Reddy, who plays Rama, the daughter of Khansaar’s king who is given the responsibility to oversee the affairs of the kingdom in his absence when all hell breaks loose. She is made to look powerful—bold makeup, exalted hair and wardrobe, protruding eyes, gravelly voice—but all of it is cosmetic. What she says or does never has any real impact.
Unsurprisingly, it is the men who call all the shots both on and off-screen. Shivakumar’s slick production design, Anbariv’s (Anbumani and Arivumani) hyper-stylised action choreography, Ujwal Kulkarni’s clever editing, and Bhuvan Gowda’s distinct visual palette all come together homogenously as one to elevate Neel’s vision and give the audience a spectacle rooted in heightened drama.
It isn’t just Baahubali or Game of Thrones, Salaar: Part 1 — Ceasefire handpicks generously from several timeless stories that enrich and embellish our cultural zeitgeist. Deva and Vardha’s unquestioning, devotional friendship has strong hints of Krishna and Sudama. They will also remind you of Ram Charan and NTR Jr’s characters from Rajamouli’s RRR. The political powerplay isn’t too different from GOT or Mahabharata either. However, I found Neel’s use and interpretation of the color red the most fascinating. In telling the story of how one of the local chieftain’s sons makes a game out of choosing and sexually violating one young tribal girl every day, he brilliantly invokes Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It is only one of the many subplots in the film but it’s the one that sears the fiercest. Salaar: Part 1 — Ceasefire is not an easy watch. It asks a lot of you. The first half is tedious, it hides more than it shows, and drags on for much longer than it should. But if you are a Prashanth Neel or a Prabhas fan, what follows next will have you leave the theatre wanting more.
