BOMBAY TALKIES REVIEWS - Page 6

"Aap bhi Allahabad se ho?" Vijay asks a slimy Mumbai cabbie and breaks into a smile almost infuriating in how guileless, how awestruck, how naively curious it is.

You've met this man.

Say on that train to Kolkata. The guy who claims, without much probing, that the world's best roshogolla comes from an unsung shop two blocks away from his home. Or on that bus in Mumbai. The one who needs just a glimpse of a Shah Rukh Khan billboard to start narrating, unprovoked, how he managed to wrench an autograph out of the star at the airport.

Men you have dismissed as idiots, men whose little victories seem atrocious in your world, men who crowd around TV news cameras, men who throng shooting locations, all day long. Men who speak a language you are conditioned to not understand, ever. Vijay, Anurag Kashyap's protagonist in Bombay Talkies, is one of those men. Awkward, nave and in our vocabulary of living, even stupid. After all, who'd think it'd be easy to walk into Amitabh Bachchan's house and gift him a murabba? And who'd think that his father's life depended on Bachchan having that murabba? In our smart urban heads, not anyone we know.

But ask those people who stand for hours, under a scorching summer sun, just to see their favourite Bollywood star step out of the vanity van and walk to the set. How those two minutes of being pushed and elbowed around, shooed away by snarling guards and brusquely dismissed by their screen hero, make their day. Or maybe one whole week. They'd know what Kashyap is talking about. You and I can just pretend to have figured out. And debate over cups of expensive lattes.

There's not much of a story in Kashyap's Bombay Talkies short. It's about a man from Allahabad called Vijay, whose father wants him to feed half a murabba to Amitabh Bacchan. The son is told that sharing a murabba with Amitabh Bhachchan is his father's last wish. Kashyap, doesn't let his protagonist have his tete-a-tete with Bachchan easily. Vijay suffers. He loses money, gets shoved around, beaten up, told off before he gets to meet Bachchan. And when he does, Kashyap doesn't make it a clich Bollywood climax – in fact the scene is not even the film's climax. Bachchan, in true filmi style, doesn't hug his fan or invite him for lunch. He looks all set to turn him away, but relents half-willingly. Kashyap doesn't sell you the promise of magic, he tells you a story that is not too difficult to stomach. Why Kashyap stands out in Bombay Talkies would be giving out the whole story of his short. Let's just say this – Kashyap uses Bachchan as a prop for the rest of his oddball of a story.

Dibakar Banerjee, on the other hand, had a character written by Satyajit Ray to rest his film on. I have not read Potol Babu Filmstar and can't tell how far Banerjee's Purandar strays from Potol Babu, but I'd not be complaining even if he did. Nawazuddin Siddiqui is the kind of actor who makes you want to curse the interval, the aunty walking across your seat mid-film and make co-actors seem like pointless item songs.

Banerjee seems to know that well and his camera never misses Siddiqui for one moment. As a theatre-learnt extra looking for work in a Bollywood film, Purandar is one those men who break your heart with the cold resignation with which they have embraced failures, swallowed insults and decided to make peace with the unrewarding struggle that life feels like.

It is difficult to tell who is a more endearing Purandar. The conformist who has fed himself a fistful of self-made explanations to make his life, failure and struggle seem just a little less unfair? Or the bristling, self-righteous, demanding artist who at times, pants to burst out of the other Purandar's carefully sewn seams of patience? You'll not be able to figure anytime soon and that conflict is one of the many things that make Dibakar Banerjee one of the most stunning filmmakers of our times.

However, Karan Johar too has managed to surprise many. Read Simantini Dey's review on Firstpost here.

It was faulty to underestimate the cinematic preferences of audiences and presume that Bombay Talkies wont fare well. The film which opened to a poor opening on Friday launched itself well on Saturday. With the weekend beginning, the film showed promising growth by doubling the occupancy since Friday. The multiplexes mainly recorded a substantial performances in the later shows of Saturday at all main urban centers. As per early estimates, the movie collected an approx of 2.50 crores at the domestic box office. However, the accurate figures will soon be updated.

Bombay Talkies though attempting to commemorate a very significant year of Indian cinema, the film will largely be lauded for its distinctly wonderful films. Directors Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap deserve credit for tailoring their powerful stories in the small time frame. The film has a long way to go, but for the beginning, the movie has finally picked up to a start it truly deserves.