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Film:
Bombay Velvet
Cast:
Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Karan Johar
Director:
Anurag kashyapr
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Anurag Kashyap’s ambitious dream-come-true fantasy has its origins in New York rather than sepia toned Bombay. Transplanting a milieu alien to the unique city culture of Bombay reeks of inventiveness but doesn’t ring true in either form or content. His influences are obvious – Dick Tracy, The Godfather and many other noir styled underworld gangster thrillers. But the Americanizing doesn’t help build connectedness with an audience expecting a true-blue picture of a late forties to early seventies representation of the birth of a city – even though he manages to intersperse the narrative with the mill union strikes, politician-underworld-builder nexus, and the real estate and tabloid wars significant to that era.
Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Bombay Velvet’ is as ambitious as it is faulty. Strongly influenced by James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet and admittedly fused with Gyan Prakash’s ‘Mumbai Fables,’ the script tries to do much
more than it should in its attempt to romanticize and encapsulate the internecine struggles and events that surrounded the making of Mumbai as we see it today.
The film begins in 1949 with headlines of Gandhi’s assassination and the Godse trial while in the foreground a mother and child, the young Johnny Balraj, disembark from a northern railway train. A few steps out of the station she begs for a job from a passerby. Cut to a young girl, Rosie singing in a church in Portuguese occupied Goa and catching the attention of a sexually divergent Portuguese Man (Remo) – who offers to adopt and train her for a musical future.
Rosie (Anushka Sharma) and Johnny Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor) have their lives intertwined with the history of the growing city. Rosie does a bikini shoot, works as a beautician by day and sings for her supper in a Jazz club by night. Johnny gets mixed up with a smuggler (Denzel Smith) and then a lofty publisher /Jazz club owner/ Power broker, Khambatta (Karan Johar) while moonlighting as a street-fighter by night, in his attempt to make it big.
The Johnny and Rosie live-in love affair is expected and Johnny continues to clobber people to death on the silliest pretext while the cops continue to stay out of the picture awaiting their cue for a close-to-interval entry. A natty CBI sleuth (Kay Kay Menon) does the honours thereafter while Johnny is given free license to go on the kill before the final comeuppance.
The film is beautifully mounted no doubt, but the detailing is suspect. Also the digital masking of Mumbai highrises from the Marine Drive skyline doesn’t come off convincingly. The attempt to stick to close-ups for the Bombay inferences only makes the experience just a little too claustrophobic and uncomfortable.
The costumes especially those worn by the lead don’t befit the period (they reek of designer
labels unbecoming to their status in the film’s story) and the styling is quite haphazard too. Rosie’s hairstyles are fine but Johnny’s looks like he had perma-frost applied in an attempt to ape the MGR look. The distinctive sound design and the jazz score are quite elevating though.
Ranbir is unclear whether he wants to ape Raj Kapoor or Al Pacino. It’s basically a confused performance from a gifted actor. Anushka’s lacks guile – a much needed requisite for a performer. The romance is clichéd and the chemistry between the two is also quite thanda even given the fact that they are shown together in several passionate clinches. Karan Johar is the weakest link here. As Kaizad Khambatta, a media moghul cum power broker of sorts he is out-of-place in the milieu and looks uncomfortable right through. The rest of the cast do duty as expected but none of them stand-out and can be reckoned with save for Satyadeep Misra as Chimman, Balraj’s childhood friend.
Bombay Velvet, though resplendent in ambition, lacks a sense of purpose other than the obvious leap-of-progression for the director. This is one Anurag Kashyap film that just doesn’t get it right.
johnsont307@gmail.com
Johnson Thomas
