Director Dibakar Banerjee is more interested in establishing the small world his characters, both older and younger, inhabit. You are much more excited and involved with these people because Banerjee weaves all the fabric of his creation instead of just weaving the design; he allows his camera to capture the sight, sound and essence of his world and you respond and reciprocate more than you would with other directors’ works. He is one of the best new Indian directors I have seen, whose films have received far less credit than they deserve. Everyone talks about the involvement of Karan Johar or Anurag Kashyap and only a few (including myself) may have opted for Bombay Talkies to take care of Dibakar Banerjee. His segment is called Star and it comes right after Johar’s opening segment; Banerjee’s work simply blows the other segments out of the water, with only Kashyap’s Murabba able to escape unscathed. But poor Zoya Akhtar’s segment, Sheila Ki Jawaani, isn’t having much luck, barely up to the standards of Banerjee’s work. And Johar’s hokey gay-themed segment looks limp in comparison.
I don’t mean to say that you should skip the other segments and just watch Banerjee’s; Bombay Talkies is a much better deal than most other Indian movies you can see in theaters. It’s in limited release and has managed to rack up lackluster box office grosses, but it surely deserves to be recognized for being novel, not just being novel. Four different directors with quite different styles and palettes submitted their works for an anthology film (a term for many short films that are compiled into a feature film) and you, as an audience member, have a lot more to discuss here than just quality. of the film itself – you compare the works of these filmmakers and form your own preferences. I loved Banerjee’s work, but I’ve heard a lot of others praise Karan Johar more, but what happens here is that everyone talks a lot more about the movie than normal. For this alone, people should check out Bombay Talkies before it rolls out of theaters with its final salute to Bollywood.
Named after a prestigious film studio of the same name that opened in the 1930s and has now closed, Bombay Talkies is a cinematic ode to celebrate Bollywood’s centenary. This ode is sung by four directors: 1) Karan Johar, known for his epic-length melodramas with names usually beginning with the letter ‘K’, 2) Dibakar Banerjee, a highly talented director whose works evoke the multiplicities seen in neo-realist films 3) Zoya Akhtar, who won a couple of awards in India and comes from a family of talented actors, musicians and lyricists and 4) Anurag Kashyap, whose works were screened at Cannes. While Johar and Akhtar share this directing style possessed by many of the filmmakers who have been raised in this industry since the beginning, Kashyap and Banerjee inject the flavor of world cinema into mainstream Bollywood.
Johar starts first, his film is about Avinash, a lonely gay man estranged from his family who meets a lonely married straight woman whose sex life (with her husband, of course. Infidelity isn’t often addressed in Indian movies) is sterile. There’s the husband who’s bored and lonely (and not at all turned on by his wife) and loves old Hindi songs, and things get complicated when Avinash meets the husband and her gay sensor turns on. He knows exactly what is going to happen next. Once Johar is done, it’s Banerjee’s turn: his film is about a lower-middle-class Maharashtrian (Nawazuddin Siddique, awards on the way) whose many petty ambitions, including raising Emus, have so far never taken off. that he has the golden opportunity to share screen space with megastar Ranbir Kapoor one day. If Banerjee makes us hate theater owners for keeping an interval for the movie, Zoya Akhtar’s post-intermission segment about a little boy who hates soccer and likes to dress like a girl and who idolizes actress Katrina Kaif makes us hate the film’s publisher for not including more of Dibakar’s story. The final segment is a bit weird and quirky, and it’s from Kashyap; his film is about Vijay, a native of Allahabad who, at the insistence of his ailing father, travels to Bombay to offer the King of Bollywood half of a Murabba, a jam pickle, so that the other half, once blessed with Bachchan’s uhm… teeth. it could be consumed by Vijay’s father to recover.
Johar’s segment is simple, they are quite predictable; you are very aware of what is going to happen and since it is a Johar film, you know that the characters will shed a lot of tears. Aside from its corny and hackneyed subject matter, I really wasn’t sure if it portrayed gays in a flattering light. Akhtar, on the other hand, makes a film full of precocious, annoying children and one-dimensional characters, especially the boy’s father who keeps repeating, “Football is a man’s game.” Football will make you strong’. Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Murabba’ is delicious and charming, but nowhere near the richness of Banerjee’s offerings. There is so much to enjoy, so many little things that we see happen in Banerjee’s film, and he is a pro when it comes to handling his camera and sound. There is a common theme of the father-son relationship in all four shorts.
There is a music video after the shorts celebrating Bollywood’s hundred years, and they added a montage showing Bollywood during that period. Towards the end, stars like Aamir Khan show up, but I was sadly disappointed by the presence of some actors like Sonam Kapoor here, showing how backward Bollywood has become. Why couldn’t they let Nawazuddin sing? Gold Kalki Koechlin? When your whole movie is about celebrating the real stars, why spoil the moment by bringing in the hundred million rupees club whose movies are star-studded and pointless?