BOMBAY VELVET BO collections and REVIEWS - Page 44

The quotidian, Henri Lefebvre writes, is where people are born, live and die," to borrow a line from Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables, which the film uses for context, and it is this thatAnurag Kashyap achieves artistry over.

Bombay Velvet is the story of Johnny Balraj, a muscleman born of a city that pushed him to barter his brawn for protection. Ambitious and willing to make the trades life requires of him, Balraj begins by protecting his best friend Chiman, is sucked into the smuggling trade and, by a turn of events, is picked up to be the manager of Bombay Velvet, a club run by the camp and scheming Kaizad Khambatta. With a Les Miserables undercurrent, the misdeeds of his past pursue him in shadowy Inspector Kulkarni, even as he pursues Rosie, virginal without virginity, she with the voice of an angel and the miseries of a once-innocent Tess d'Urbervilles. The game, of love, ambition, and chicanery intertwined with the thrusts and jabs of the city's burgeoning self intruding into the lives of those who would own its growth, forms the narrative.

Set in Mumbai's Jazz Age, when trams trundled down Bombay streets, exotic dancers in lounge bars seduced, opium dens soothed, the film opens to the grand scape of a now forgotten city. Kashyap is Dickensian in his recreation of the 1960s. Harbours are rife with smuggling and the birthing of the city's now infamous gangs. The linguistic reshaping of Bombay is being entrenched. Reclamation is contentious. The communism of the mill workers' movements is a pressing chorus. In the red light districts immigrant labour from the chawl and the suited-booted gentleman editor may yet vie for the attention of the same woman. Licence Raj prevails and the colonial hangover marks our aspirations. Art deco is our social metaphor. And editors such as Russi Karanjia, Mulk Raj Anand and tabloids such as Blitz and Current, Davids to the mighty The Times of India Goliath, are vociferous muckrakers to the establishment.

To his credit, this time appears in tinges, setting a context subtly shaping the idea of what the city begins to stand for. "Nariman has a point and we are on it," says the Maharaja from an Air India hoarding; at once crucial and incidental to the narrative at hand. Within these paradoxes, the narrative frames.

There is no easy way to encapsulate the making of a city as complex as Bombay, in as much as Bombay Velvet holds neon signboards to its flaws. Period costumes in extras are stilted, transitions assume too much historical knowledge, and in parts, supporting actors regress into standard exaggerated Bollywoodised play-acting. Archival footage is too contrived an insertion and ought to have been recreated. But to his credit, Kashyap, elevating himself to a new language of filmmaking, integrates the city's multiple, and his own, sensibilities. His tributes vary from James Cagney's The Roaring Twenties (1939) to Raging Bull (1980) to Guru Dutt's C.I.D. (1956). But it is in the rat-a-tat-a-tat of Tommy guns deftly punctuating the music like a metronome, you hear the sound of a filmmaker enjoying his craft.

Dialogue is minimal, silence and expression speak, and the subterranean music rises to take over the narrative when neither will do. Where Indian filmmakers once used show and tell, punctuated with song and dance, to release the sequences of a narrative, within Bombay Velvet, Kashyap seamlessly uses them all simultaneously, and just enough.

It is into this milieu that Kashyap introduces Ranbir Remade. Bombay Velvet does for Ranbir what Shree 420 once did for Raj Kapoor. It casts Johnny Balraj, Dick Whittington to this London of the East, secularised struggler of the streets, immigrant with dreams shot to pieces by the establishment, in the mould of Everyman. It brings back the socialist Bombay of when capitalism had not yet won. The innocent will learn to sink the body here.

Anushka Sharma is luminescent, wearing her woman-made-quiet-by-abuse body language eerily well. Her quiet speaks. Even within her cabaret toy role, Kashyap attempts to offer her some modicum of empowerment. Her growth delineated by the slow disappearance of the fine line of moustache on her upper lip. Her blooming from suffering a studied contrast to the patience expected of women of the era (the classic romances of the 1960s) that she addresses. In these ways Bombay Velvet takes an era forward. In her retorts, slap for slap, shove for shove, she attempts a fragile equality. Raveena Tandon, and her glinting bosom, seductive as the city that won't stop itself, is revealed on a need-to-know basis.

In the supporting cast Karan Johar discovers new depths. Machiavellian and at once made vulnerable by his own weaknesses and lust, brutal, vindictive, he draws from within himself a counter to his popular glossy image that only a Kashyap could have drawn from him. He triumphs in the climax, all but stealing it from the protagonist.

It is not by any means a flawless story, nor a comprehensive one. It does not aim to be the truth, it aims to highlight truths long forgotten. Mostly that as filmmakers and moviegoers go, there are contexts and histories upon which we stand, that we owe ourselves cognisance to. In as much, Bombay Velvet, sink or swim, is a film much larger than the sum of its flaws.