In a scene in Ketan Mehta's Rang Rasiyawe see Raja Ravi Varma (Randeep Hooda) paint a picture of his muse, Sugandha (Nandana Sen) as the goddess of Knowledge, Saraswati. After, the painting is done and Sugandha sees it for the first time, she is moved to tears, seemingly by the beauty of it. However, once the camera moves from her face and pans into the painting itself, you will realise that she might have been crying because the woman in the illustration doesn't look a thing like her.
As the audience, you too will have those moments during the film, when you will want to cry your eyes out, not because of the emotional scenes or the drama that's unfolding in front of you, but because of the lack of it. Mehta's Rang Rasiya is about one of India's most famous painters, Raja Ravi Varma, a man who introduced us to Hindu gods and goddesses in human forms through his paintings. Varma also happens to be the man who introduced consumerism in India. It was his mass-produced images of gods and goddesses that found their way into Indian households and though more than a hundred years have passed Varma still remains in thousands of our homes and his paintings of Hindu gods are still worshipped.
In Rang Rasiya, Mehta tries to chronicle the life of Varma - his passion for art, his conflicts with self-righteous godmen who try to impose artistic censorship on him, his lust for appreciation and need to reach out to the masses and lastly, his relationship with his muse, Sugandha, who also happens to be a prostitute and while all these sound great in paper, somehow, onscreen, it seems like an epic fail.
To begin with, the dialogues in the film are facepalm-worthy. If you thought that a film based on a story that's already hundred years old cannot sound dated under any circumstances, perhaps you should check out Rang Rasiya for cringe-inducing dialogues in the first fifteen minutes of the film, like when a maid servant whom Varma likes to paint, asks him seductively, "Kya tum sirf ek chitrakar ho aur main ek cheez". You are left wondering if it is one of those B-grade 90's films with hammy wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogues.
At one point we see Sachin Khedekar, who plays the role of a diwanji in the film, welcomes Varma to his Mumbai home. He gives Varma a warm hug and as if he were one of those nice hospitable guys in Sooraj Barjatya films says, "Welcome to Bombay", because, hey! that's how Indians spoke to each other 100 years ago.
It also doesn't help that the background score of the film sounds like Om Namah Shivaya-meets-Kyun Ki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. In every other scene, the score keeps giving you cues about how you should feel and although initially it sounds annoying, you soon realise how crucial it is for the background score to tell what to feel, especially because with such abrupt and choppy editing, it is very difficult to figure out which way the script is going.
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