S.S. Rajamouli on “RRR“ (Rajamouli, Rama & Ram) | TIFF 2023

Born in India, S.S. Rajamouli presents a unique, distinct voice within the landscape of contemporary world cinema. With a wide-spanning oeuvre that includes 12 feature films, Rajamouli is known for his inventive style, epic scale, mythological and historical reference points, and films that evade genre-specificity. Set in Colonial India of the 1920s, RRR mythologizes the friendship between the real-life Indian revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem (portrayed respectively by Ram Charan and Jr NTR). The two historical figures never met in recorded history, but what writer-director S.S. Rajamouli presupposes is… maybe they did? That maybe Bheem was at one point drawn to Delhi to rescue a child from the tyrannical British Raj (personified with magnificent sadism by Ray Stevenson and Alison Doody), and perhaps Raju became entangled with this quest while on an enigmatic mission of his own. With RRR, Rajamouli hasn’t just printed the legend — he has projected it across a barrage of sublime se