Monday, May 18, 2015

On "Bombay Velvet"


Bombay Velvet is an ambitious film. Anurag Kashyap's assiduously crafted period piece wants to be an alternate history of Mumbai's rise after the fall of the British Raj. To this end, Kashyap shows us archival footage of Bombay and a map of the city as its overlords envisioned it at the time. He has characters deliver, in the form of dialogue, contextual information about land reclamation and political chicanery.  In a postscript, he updates us on the present status of the city and tells us what came of the actual real estate developments that the fictional characters in the film concern themselves with. An enormous set and impressive visual effects are used to gorgeously evoke a vision of Bombay in the fifties and sixties that is so richly and specifically detailed that it reads as authentic. Kashyap is intent on making a magnum opus.

The problem with the film is that its grand aspirations are tacked on to a story that is pure pulp, and not particularly inspired pulp at that. The plot is focused on an immoral goon who is, like the film constructed around him, frighteningly ambitious. It is the usual rags-to-riches-to-revenge stuff that is rife with all sorts of ramshackle coincidences and improbable developments. And it is not sound enough scaffolding for the Serious Filmmaking that Kashyap is going for in his retelling of the initial chapters in Mumbai's post-Independence history. The masala-noir contrivances don't really hold up under the kind of scrutiny that a film that actually wants to say something meaningful about history would generally be subjected to. On the other hand, the filmmaking is often slightly bloodless, and that approach might be in line with the high-minded tangents Kashyap wants to make but is at odds with the movie's larger-than-life, filmi aspects. 

Furthermore, the protagonists aren't particularly compelling. Johnny Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor) wants to be a big-shot because he started out with nothing. But he is not interesting, uniquely intelligent, or even charming. He just wants more money and more power. He is arrogant, evil-tempered, and homicidal. He doesn't have a heart of gold or any scruples to speak of. He's basically the villain from a standard-issue Bollywood movie, except he gets a backstory. Oh, and he likes this girl. Rosie Noronha (Anushka Sharma) has killed her abuser and run away from Portugese-occupied Goa. She takes risqué pictures to jumpstart her career as a singer and finds herself a sugar daddy. On this man's command, she enters Balraj's life to get something out of him (negatives for an incriminating picture of a politician – the business surrounding these negatives is uninteresting and unconvincing throughout) but ends up falling in love with him. All of this ought to make for a fascinating character, but Rosie is mostly passive and sad. When the film showed us Rosie's childhood right after it showed us Balraj's, I figured that it would really be about both of them. But Rosie is just The Girl. I wish we'd seen her write her own music or rise through the ranks at Bombay Velvet, the club Balraj runs. (I suspect, based on the presence of Raveena Tandon, who gives the film a jolt of much-needed sex appeal in her all-too-brief appearances, that a subplot about Rosie supplanting an established singer at the club was left on the editing table. I feel like too much has been taken out of the film in general; as a result, it's slightly incoherent.) 

Balraj and Rosie's love is supposed to motivate much of the film's action. Balraj wants to make it big so he can win Rosie, for one. But Kashyap, once again misjudging what is interesting about his film, does not really show us how the two actually fall in love. Also, the leads are not the sort of performers who can enliven a thin or unsympathetic part by sheer force of charisma. Madhuri Dixit and Amitabh Bachchan, to name the most notable examples, routinely employed megawatt star power to turn wan outlines of an archetype into characters worth rooting for. Kapoor and Sharma are both excellent actors, but they are not the sort of actors who can deliver a memorable performance when the character is basic-ish on paper.They both do the best they can, and Sharma is spectacularly moving in the film's showpiece number, Dhadaam Dhadaam (Amit Trivedi's score, by the way, is genius throughout), but old-fashioned magnetism is not either star's strong suit. I kept fantasy-casting the film as I was watching it, and I wondered what Ranveer Singh, with his manic, slightly sleazy energy, and Huma Qureshi, with her volcanic sexual charisma, would have done with these roles. 

The only intriguing prominent character in the film is Kaizad Khambatta, the silken, scheming power player who backs Balraj's rise and authors his fall. Karan Johar, in his first major film role, gives us a sense of the unconventional character's dimensions and desires in a surprisingly sexy performance; the screen just about thrums with menace when he appears. Khambatta merely alludes to his origin story (he is the scion of a major publishing family that had fallen on hard times and has had to rebuild the newspaper practically from scratch), but Johar finds a way to work the weight of the neurosis resulting from his unpleasant history as well as the heat of his lust for Balraj into his scenes. Khambatta is also the only character in whom Kashyap successfully reconciles the film's interest in the backroom politics that created modern-day Mumbai and its negotiation of more genre-y conventions.

I want to be clear that I did not find Bombay Velvet worthless or tiresome. It looks and sounds stunning. It is intelligent in its craftsmanship and never boring. But I can't stop thinking about what the film could have been. For one, I rather wish Kashyap had set the film more fully at the titular club. I can imagine a Bombay Velvet that might have been about the schemers and climbers at each table, about the backstage rivalries and the shady dealings, and about the love between the ambitious manager of the club and its ingenue singer. It might have been more of an ensemble film, giving us glimpses of a variety of colorful characters instead of a conventional pair of lovers. It would have allowed for more tightly focused, satisfying storytelling and for a more organic-seeming, less awkward exploration of the city's culture and ethos at that time. But that might not be the film Kashyap wanted to make. As it stands, Bombay Velvet is admirable for its chutzpah, but it is not quite the Great Film it clearly aspires to be. (I'm very curious about what an extended cut would look like, though.)