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Bombay Talkies is supposed to be a tribute to 100 years of Hindi cinema where four directors - Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap - come together to bring four short films in one. All four films, in their own way, pay tribute to various facets of Hindi cinema - stardom, fandom, music, dance, emotion and drama.
Bombay Talkies begins with Johar's short film which deals with a troubled marriage between an editor (played by Rani Mukherjee) of a Bollywood tabloid and a TV journalist and newsreader (Randeep Hooda). What Johar does well in his short film is that he punctuates the narrative with two of Lata Mangeshkar's iconic songs: "Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh" and "Lag Jaa Gale". Johar's take on homosexuality is by far one of the most mature takes on a subject which is often caricaturised on screen. But apart from that, the film is the weakest of the four. Johar does break out of his comfort zone - lavish sets, song and dance, over-the-top emotional drama - but compared to his three contemporaries, he falls short.
If Johar uses music as the underlining factor to tell his story, Akhtar turns to dance and a little boy's fascination with Katrina Kaif. Vicky (played by child artist Naman Jain) wants to be a dancer just like "Sheila" but his stern father wants him to play football and be a "man." Akhtar's narrative is not that strong but as a director, her strength has been to tell a story through well-etched-out characters. She shows a middle-class family where the father gets extremely upset when he sees his boy dressed as a girl dancing to Bollywood item songs. Or the boy's mother who is aware that a fun family evening would be ruined if her husband is in a bad mood. The shortest of the lot, Akhtar's story is about chasing dreams, an underlying theme in hundreds of movies made in India over the years.
It is Kashyap's film which comes closest to paying tribute to Hindi cinema in the most realistic manner. It talks about hero worship and the aura of Film Stars in the eyes of starstruck fans. Kashyap, being the intelligent director he is, strikes all the right notes. An ageing man's last wish is that his son goes to Mumbai, meets Amitabh Bachchan, and make him eat murabba. Vineet Kumar Singh, who was last seen in Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur, plays Vijay (Bachchan's most common screen name), a young man who thinks that meeting the superstar would be easy as both come from Allahabad. Kashyap's story is laced with witty dialogues and captures the small-town mentality towards movies and movie stars perfectly. The way he depicts Pratiskha, Bachchan's residence in Juhu, as a tourist attraction and a symbol of hero worship is a delight to watch.
However, it is Dibakar Banerjee who steals the show with his delightful take on Satyajit Ray's short story Patol Babu, Film Star. Banerjee's story is about a theatre actor Purandar, played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, from Sangli, now living in Mumbai with his wife, daughter and pet emu. Purandar tries his hand at various things - from emu farming to finding a job as a security guard. All he wants is to be a "star" in the eyes of a bed-ridden young girl. He accidentally lands a blink-and-a-miss role in a film, while watching a film being shot. Siddiqui is one of the most talented actors in Hindi cinema today and Banerjee's clever direction brings out the best of him. Watch him in the scene where he is rehearsing before his "shot". A delightful surprise in this short film is a brilliant cameo by Sadashiv Amrapurkar, seen on screen after a long hiatus.
Apart from a tacky and atrocious music video at the end of the four films, Bombay Talkies is an experiment which works quite well. Whether it is a tribute to 100 years of Hindi cinema is actually quite open to interpretation.
