In November 2007, two days before the release of Saawariya, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali's fifth film, the executives of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the producer of the magnum opus, were hauled into a screening room. This would be the first time they were going to see the film-which Bhansali had been nursing, editing and tinkering with, unwilling to let it rip into the world, fiercely guarding it from everyone's gaze, even that of the studio head.
Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story 'White Nights', Saawariya was crafted and announced as a milestone film, made at a then-egregious, now-mainstream budget of 35-50 crore, backed by Sony, which became the first Hollywood studio to produce an Indian film.
With Saawariya, Sonam Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor, Bombay cinema royalty she, the daughter of Anil Kapoor, a first-generation star of the 1980s and '90s, and he, the son of Rishi Kapoor, a third-generation star of the 1970s and '80s-were making their debut together. No budget spared, the nepo-kids were flown across the country to promote them, both individually and together, alongside the film. Around the same time, Vogue magazine made landfall on the subcontinent with a gonging launch, which included a "Bollywood Dreams' photo essay, featuring the sets of the film, the actors and Bhansali himself. Saawariya was set to release at the same time as the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Om Shanti Om, a meta blitzkrieg offensive of charm and nostalgia, and so the buzz, the anxiety, was all the more deafening.
Sony had been marketing the film solely on the basis of the screenplay and the trailer-which itself was delivered weeks after the decided-upon deadline, much to the frustration of the studio. The film was a black hole for all intents and purposes. No one had any idea how the film in its entirety looked, what its narrative shape or its aesthetic gloss felt like when watched end to end, how the saturated blues of the film would leak or linger in the viewer's mind, and how the stretching of time across four nights would disturb or dry over the matrix of consciousness. Uday Singh, who was the managing director of Sony at the time, noted, "It was a bubble you had to believe in."
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