An artfully garbled tale of dreams

why the director bothered.

Karan Johan gets the honour of the opening gambit and with the first dialogue itself he grabs your attention. It’s bold and it arrives with an aggression we don’t associate with the director.

Karan’s film smartly uses Madan Mohan’s songs to tell us the tragic story of a dead marriage and a gay man. The story has little to do with Bollywood, but it’s cleverly written, with dialogue that sparkle and tickle. Its emotional quotient is high and its performances are like powerful laserbeams — precise and bloody effective.

I don’t know what the point of his film was since it had little to do with cinema. I just know that I loved the film.

Shootout at Wadala

For the next film by Dibakar Banerjee, we polevault into a chawl where a lower middle class family — man, woman, child and a curious emu — lives on stories, stories of a failed business venture and films.

Of the four directors here, I find Banerjee the most interesting. He seeks inspiration for his films in books and this time he has adapted Satyajit Ray’s Patol Babu, Film Star. It is bang on. It is the story not just of Bollywood, of cinema, but is a profound monograph on actor and acting.

That Nawazuddin gets to play Ray’s Potol Babu is our good fortune and Banerjee’s ace of spades. To bask in Nawazuddin’s histrionics alone Bombay Talkies is worth a watch. He’s an actor who will be celebrated when Indian cinema celebrates its 200th birthday.

The third film, by Zoya Akhtar, is another comment on gender and sexuality. Luckily it stars the brilliant Naman Jain. This kid deserves a standing ovation despite the fact that Zoya’s fairy tale is very filmy and trite. It rests on a vision and wit so minute that I was left worrying about the next 10, forget 100 years, of Indian cinema.

The final act of Bombay Talkies is reserved for Anurag Kashyap. His story uses an emotion and obsession that most people of my vintage have nurtured and lived with for a good part of their lives. It is also the most predictable story to have come up with: A starcrazy man wants to meet, touch his favourite star.

Kashyap has everything he needs to tell his story, including the blessings of the superstar his story seeks, yet it’s flat.

Bombay Talkies ends with a very annoying song that has no credits but has the stamp of Farah Khan. Its sole purpose seems to have been to acknowledge and keep in good books the stars who are missing from the film. It was loathsome.