Modern Masters aims to showcase Rajamouli's enigmatic career and paints a context of what makes him the singular voice that defined his generation of film-makers for millions, observes Arjun Menon.
'I am a slave to only one thing: My story,' proclaims S S Rajamouli at the beginning of the first episode of Netflix's new series, Modern Masters.
The documentary tries to explore this philosophy of one of Indian cinema's most popular film-makers and curate a method to his madness that has given us some of the biggest motion pictures produced in the country, including Magadheera (2009), Eega (2012), Baahubali: The Beginning (2015), Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017) and RRR (2022).
Rajamouli sits down with Anupama Chopra for a series of interview sessions happening across the US and Tokyo. Some of his closest collaborators and family also share rare insights into his working philosophy and personal quirks.
He can perhaps be attributed for the Pan India cinema phenomenon that has broken out in the last few years. The director has steadily built a cult-like obsession overseas for his imaginative tentpole projects, the Baahubali movies and RRR, featuring extensive use of CGI-driven blockbuster storytelling.
Modern Masters: S S Rajamouli splices his life into various phases, starting with his humble beginnings and then charting a linear path through some of his career-high points.
It tries to trace his origins as a television director with the highly popular television serial Santhi Nivasam under the tutelage of legendary Telugu director K Raghavendra Rao.
The director, who helmed many episodes of the show, does not shy away from acknowledging the importance of that television experience, in equipping his confidence as a storyteller and bringing him closer to his dream of making it on the big screen.
In Modern Masters, you get a portrait of an artist's hustle recorded from up close.
In voice-over narration and occasional cutaway, you get the sense of a hard worker painstakingly working away at his vision, amidst financial and logistical limitations.
The film offers a sneak peek into the sleepless, tireless slog behind movie-making, and tries to have a conversation with the trade-offs one is expected to make, both personal and professional wise, to make it at the highest level.
M M Keeravani, one of Rajamouli's long-time collaborators and cousin, often emphasises the director's 'eye on the ball' approach to his work.
'Rajamouli is always focused on one thigh at a time. People who can keep their focus on one thing for a long time like him, will be successful,' remarks the composer, who bagged the Golden Globe and Academy Awards under the Original Song category for his chartbuster Naatu Naatu from RRR.
The documentary also paints an image of an atheist, whose fascination with mythical stories and larger-than-life godly symbolism remains a mystery to himself and the ones around him.
In a family of devout believers, we are told that the director stands apart for his atheistic values and we get a sense of that from his spiritually rigorous father and frequent script collaborator V Vijayendra Prasad.
We also get the rare anecdote of a random trip to Bali with his family and how a random statue of Arjuna -Ghatotkacha led him to conceive Baahubali as a means to recapture that imagery in some way in his films.
These asides are in plenty and the most important collaborator of his films, his actors, seems to be all praise for the visionary director. Ram Charan, Jr NTR and Prabhas are careful to explore the strict, nonchalant side of the genius, who sometimes oscillates between being a loving friend to a grueling taskmaster on sets.
James Cameron and Joe Russo also make brief appearances with their admiration for their Indian counterpart, and try to make sense of the instant connection of Rajamouli's film-making sensibility to a Western audience, which has rarely been acclimated to 'muscular film-making' of this caliber.
The documentary is not structured to be a deep examination of the authoritarian trademarks or the personality ticks that make him such a unique figure in Indian cinema history and his far-reaching global impact.
The focus lies in exploring a portrait of an obsessively-driven man with a contradictory streak, like him being fluid and non-committed to the idea of continuity in scenes if the emotional or visual flourishes do their work.
Still, we are not provided insights or context into the artistic process that makes him tick.
Anupama Chopra brings up a few of the criticisms that have been plaguing his work over the years, with the casteism allegations against the representation of Kattappa and other lower caste characters in his films as well as the general callousness of female representation and consent in his movies, highlighting a highly scrutinised song from Baahubali: The Beginning. But Rajamouli is quick to sidestep these allegations and there seems to be an air of squirminess in the response.
The director is wary of any such aspersions on his body of work and resorts to the 'I am only a slave to my story' rhetoric that seems to be a throughline of this documentary.
The documentary does not delve into the uncomfortable side of the criticism, contributing nothing more than a career highlights reel.
The inclusion of this relevant criticism seems placed in the narrative as an afterthought. It is not followed through with any real conviction, as the interviewer and interviewee move on to the next part of the doc pretty quickly.
To people familiar with Rajamouli's career over the years, the jumps might seem a bit shaky as the film omits a large chunk of his filmography, to favour the more popular entries.
A large chunk of his mid-2000s output is not included.
You get amusing analogies like the 'Cinema as Upma' philosophy of the Rajamouli family, their work ethic and the 'dark night of the soul' moments that have come to define one of the biggest directors in Indian cinema.
The documentary aims to showcase his enigmatic career and paints a context of what makes Rajamouli the singular voice that defined his generation of film-makers, for millions.
Modern Masters: S S Rajamouli streams on Netflix.
