On demand: "Rangeela"

Ram Gopal Varma's self-reflexive romance Rangeela opens with the most Nineties musical number imaginable; it's a hell of a way to introduce its restless heroine. To scatter a few Western reference points, the routine starts as a Hal Hartley-ish soft shoe shuffle, turning heads on a Bombay sidestreet, but matters rapidly become altogether more Flashdancey, and soon this chica and her cohort are overpowering armed troops and running off into the sunset with their weapons. (Heaven knows what this insurrection has to do with the rapping toddler we encounter at one point.) A hell of a gal, then, this Mili (Urmila Matondkar), a voluminously haired agent of chaos and change - albeit one who just wants to dance, a position she fills in her day job as a Bollywood background artist. (The prologue is a dream, but it's also the kind of dream routinely choreographed on soundstages across Bombay.) Opportunity knocks when the leading lady quits the titular production, and our Mili is offered a rapid promotion to the limelight. Yet with opportunity comes renewed complication, in this case a choice Mili faces between her rough-edged scalper boyfriend Munna (Aamir Khan), very much a creature of the streets, and Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff), the brooding screen idol she now finds herself acting opposite, very much the worldly, debonair older man to Munna's snarky, sulky boy. Even this, though, feels too rational a framing for a masala movie that increasingly begins to flirt with the irrational - and that doesn't seem all that many lost marbles away from succumbing to full-on amour fou.

The central love triangle yields a modern Cinderella story (Munna sports a Buttons-like cap, while his best pal collects his conquests' slippers) and a snapshot of a newly confident film industry that is also, in itself, a product of a newly confident film industry. Yet Varma also views that industry as its own fairytale, complete with heroes, heroines, monsters and magic, with stories that become lore. (Among this script's real-life referents: the success and provenance of the previous year's Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, the backstory of Amitabh Bachchan, the films of Coppola and Spielberg.) The Munna-Mili-Raj affair, in this context, assumes the air of a much-discussed blind item, torn from the tabloids' gossip pages and now splashed in vivid Technicolor across the big screen; it's scuttlebutt writ large. As that suggests, this is no small exercise in style, rather a movie movie that, in its extravagance and excess, indirectly explains how its director ended up overseeing erotic thrillers. Every sequence in Rangeela is its own dream, a fantasy defined by a prevailing lushness of image and this camera's essentially democratic gaze. Varma's scenes of everyday Bombay life are every bit as seductive as those involving the film set: everything is movie, if you know where to put the lights and which filters to use. A.R. Rahman's songs similarly avoid the conventional beats: by mid-Nineties Bollywood's radio-friendly standards, they're practically avant-garde, their strangeness only exacerbated by Varma's experimental shot compositions. Why are Mili and Munna flying on a bright yellow sofa-taxi over the New York skyline to the strains of what sounds like a Kate Bush B-side? Then again: why shouldn't they be? This is a movie, after all. The film's disparate energies and personalities would break up and travel in very different directions in the years that followed - an RGV biography, at this point, would be a hell of a read - but what they imprinted here counts as thrilling proof of how adventurous and voracious the Hindi mainstream of the 1990s was in its pursuit of the new and vital, of fresh takes on the old familiar stories. Thirty years later, Rangeela remains as fresh, tart and tantalising as the best gelato: popular film art you may feel an urge to lick.

Rangeela is currently streaming via Prime Video; as part of this year's London Indian Film Festival, I'll be in conversation with Aamir Khan at the BFI Southbank this Thursday (the 16th) at 6pm - further details here.