BomBay Talkies: Apt tribute to 100 years of Cinema


BomBay Talkies
Starring: Rani Mukherjee, Amitabh Bachchan, Randeep Hooda
Rated: 8.5/10
The four short stories by the fab four directors are very aam aadmi — and yet very stunning, quite apart from anything aam in presentation. As a genre, (a short stories’ feature film),Bombay Talkies absolutely lives up to your expectations — not just with moving storylines but also with powerful presentation and refreshing direction to all the drama packed in the around 30-minute tales.
It is a wholesome tribute to 100 years of cinema, and the way it has been woven together, similar and yet so distinct, breeds hope and promise that our cinema is not hurtling, it is rising to the occasion. And if such cinema can be made, Bollywood is actually much more arrived than its song and dance tag.
Starting with a take on homosexuality, Karan Johar puts up a hard-hitting inaugural mount — very away from the larger than life family drama and over-the-top romances he is known for. Here, he is spartan, to the point, potent and refreshingly different. Rani Mukherjee as the sexy journalist wife of Randeep Hooda, the TV presenter, makes her mark not just with her cleavage showing blouses and ethnic cotton sarees but also with her burst of histrionics in her moment of discovery. The song, ajeeb dastan hai yeh, especially when sung by a beggar girl, gets to you as no other song has done in a long, long while.
My personal favourite though was Zoya Akhtar’s small boy wanting to be a dancer like Katrina Kaif, hiding his dream from his strict dad and helping his sister go for a trip her father can’t afford. It’s a moving story and the child actor is just perfect.
Deebakar Banerjee is himself and even if the tag of it being his story hadn’t popped up, you would have known it is his baby. Of course, the elan with which Nawazuddin Siddiqui portrays a failed theatre artist who finds his want in an impromptu role he is asked to play in a film, engages you, and not just briefly.
Anurag Kashyap, on the other hand, gets reality bites on tape in style when he sends a UP bhaiyya all the way from Allahabad to Mumbai to make Amitabh Bachchan bite into an amla murabba just to make his dying father happy. His tears join your tears, his angst evokes your’s — and that’s the beauty of being with Kashyap. But don’t move away as the credits start rolling. The showstopper comes after that. That’s a stunner too!
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 5 May, 2013

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