A prince agreeing to leave a kingdom can be a much bigger event than an army crossing a landscape. Ramayana: Rise of a Legend has the resources to stage both and the difficulty of persuading an audience to feel the difference. Nitesh Tiwari’s first installment follows Rama and Sita into marriage and exile and builds toward a conflict the film can establish without bringing it to a resolution. There is real power in the production’s willingness to give the story a large physical scale. Its most revealing choices come when that scale has to make room for a person deciding what a promise requires.
Ranbir Kapoor gives Rama an appealing restraint. Virtue is hard to play when the people surrounding a character have already agreed how to describe it. An actor can make a decision feel consequential by leaving space for the other things the character knows he will have to give up. That work is especially useful as the circumstances of exile take shape. The household’s obligations have a weight that an audience can grasp before the film offers an account of their place in the larger story. Tiwari is stronger when he lets the time it takes to leave a place supply some of that weight.
Ravi Dubey’s Lakshmana offers a useful third perspective on the exile. Loyalty can lead two people to the same place without asking quite the same thing of them. A brother who chooses to accompany Rama has a different relationship to the loss of the kingdom from the man who has agreed to leave it. The film gains variety when the three travelers can be considered as a new household, with differences in who made the original decision and who will have to help carry it out. The emotional scale of the story changes once a public act has to be lived through in much smaller company.
Sai Pallavi gives Sita a distinct attention. A woman entering an arrangement governed by other people’s promises can have quite precise reasons to insist on the role she will play in it. The film has ample room for such decisions. It does not always give them the same care as an arrival or a change of scenery. The ceremony is handsome. The more urgent question is what the participants will be able to ask of one another once nobody is present to watch them honor it. Pallavi makes that question interesting even when the visual emphasis moves elsewhere.
Yash’s Ravana gives the film an imposing center of gravity elsewhere in the world. The character has more presence when a room seems to have been arranged by people with a real interest in what he might decide. Some effects-heavy passages sacrifice that immediacy for a level of finish that sits uneasily beside the performances. The film can be extraordinarily vivid in a carefully composed view of a group carrying lamps or wearing costume with a weight one can imagine. Motion through some of the constructed landscapes has a more generic quality. A huge image can be remarkably hard to inhabit when its smaller elements never seem likely to resist the people moving through it.
The difference between palace and forest has a visual use that goes beyond the chance to supply two beautiful settings. A palace is full of positions in which a person can be seen to possess a particular standing. The forest offers fewer ways to assert it and more occasions on which the characters need someone else’s judgment. Tiwari is good at suggesting what the first kind of space demands through arrangement and costume. Some of the effects work makes the second space less available as a place in which a decision could be changed by the ground beneath someone’s feet.
The first installment spends enough time establishing future events that it can feel as though its best reward has been promised to a later film. It also contains the beginning of a more immediate drama, in which an act of obedience changes the conditions of a marriage and the way a person can stand before a community. The performers have the means to make those alterations count. A somewhat narrower attention to what the characters are now being asked to do would give the spectacle a more durable measure of consequence.
