You have taken my breath away and I need it back.

Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela
Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2013 India
Starring: Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Richa Chadda, Supriya Pathak, Barkha Bisht Sengupta

Romeo & Juliet may well be the most adapted of all Shakespeare's work, and with varying degrees of success. From George Cukor's more or less straight 1936 version, which retained the ages of the characters despite the casting of forty three year old Leslie Howard, thirty four year old Norma Shearer and fifty four year old alcoholic John Barrymore, to Baz Luhrmann's gloriously stylised 1996 revision, featuring Mercutio in drag and a friar with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts, to Prokofiev's beautiful ballet, so it's pleasing to see that the Indian director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has managed to create an adaptation totally different from any other (and at least as extravagant and bonkers as Luhrmann's) by transporting the action to a modern-day India where men sell machine guns in street markets (Rajanikovs not Kalashnikovs you know) and children are chased across rooftops by rifle-wielding members of rival clans, and taking liberties with the story (and the dialogue) but remaining self-aware at all times. For example, when the two lovers meet for the first time they pull guns on one another and Ram (Romeo) comments "It's destiny, we're star cross'd lovers". Likewise later they communicate via their mobile phones using rhyming couplets and use powder as blood before sharing a kiss. And Leela (Juliet), far from being a reserved teenager, is arguably the main seducer of the two and frequently seen on top of Ram, half-jokingly threatening to kill him. Moreover, Ram is a cocky, swaggering car thief and porn salesman who doesn't believe in war, is introduced to us astride a motorbike with his purple shirt open to the waist and a ludicrous moustache and almost immediately launches into a frankly lurid crotch-thrusting musical sequence (which, in keeping with the knowing script, is commented on by his brother). I also promise that it's a lot more fun than I probably make it sound. It's entertaining, sexy, romantic, ingenious, fantastically quotable and jaw-droppingly sumptuous to watch and almost seamlessly slides into a surprisingly violent and affecting drama where Leela's mother (a wonderfully villainous, film-stealing Supriya Pathak), faced with her daughter's insistence that she won't remove the ring Ram has given her, attempts to cut her finger off with a nutcracker. Of course the warring families and betrayals synonymous with Bollywood are also written into the narrative but the film transcends the cliché, only falling apart in one fight scene that's so ridiculous that you can't help laughing at it. I'm not saying it's the best reworking of the play, in fact far from it, but for a film that has so many points that really shouldn't work but do it's a pretty big triumph. When you take into account that last year's 47 Ronin cost a reported $175million and was appalling (and lost money at the box office) and, despite its magnificent lavishness, Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela only cost between $5.7million and $14million and is brilliant (and made nearly $33million) it's an even larger accomplishment.