Most guys, who have had their luck with women, would have dated that one stunner in college - the properly-endowed, fashionably correct, classy chick who can work a drink with the finesse of a violinist. She walks lightly, talks in measured volumes, breathes like she's sipping on wine, smells like luxury, purses her lips every now and then, swears with the decorum of a priest, dances like moonlight bouncing off of dark windows and is great in bed. But she's not the girl you would tag along with to a book reading. Or review porn movies with; staying up all night, exchanging shoplifting experiences, naming freckles on each other's bodies, laughing at quips with extremely low taste, eating food directly off the pan, or fart while under the covers to get familiar with. In other words, the stunner is not a keeper. Because with every conversation that you share, you know you are only entering waters that are just ankle-deep. Of the two, Bombay Velvet is the former - all style, very little substance.
Shyam Benegal, on describing Pather Panchali said "It had the ability of a great work to make you see the general in the particular and the particular in the general." Kashyap invariably weaves this trait into most of his films, garnishing it with an ingenious objectivity that resulted in modern classics like Black Friday, DevD and Ugly. Here too, we are shown glimpses of this genius (that alas get lost amid the ostensible trappings of a commercial fare). There is a comedic satirist, a regular at the jazz club, poking fun at the socio-economic condition of Reclamation-age Bombay - a trope seldom handled by any other filmmaker. When was the last time you saw a period drama having a comic to hold a mirror to the polity of that time, however relevant it is in reality? "This is just classic unconventional film-making" you start to think, only to have the rug pulled from beneath your feet. And I don't mean it in a good way. The plot is obviously the culprit here. It starts off with an idiosyncratic setup of the political state of 60's Bombay, taking on the inception of Nariman Point as a cultural and historical organ of the city, and interspersing (again, idiosyncratically)it with the blooming of love between two broken souls stuck in adolescence. You are thinking this is Gangs of Wasseypur meets DevD, the jazz version of the masterpiece that is Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, but the story loses its focus well into the second half. Kashyap begins by coloring his love epic with the turbulence of the times it is set in, but runs out of pastels midway through the narration. The second half isn't bad though. It just turns indifferent to the tone that had been setup, and this is BV's greatest failure - it's uncertainty in what it wants to tell. Some twenty minutes into the movie, after quite impressively establishing the lead characters, we are shown a scene where our man Johnny Balraj (Ranbir) is watching James Cagney's The Roaring Twenty's, tearing up at the climax where a dying Cagney lies in the arms of Priscilla Lane, for her to brood - "He was a big shot". It is here where we get a premonition of the familiar path this ill-fated romance will take, and yet we hope that it is done with flourish.
Being a fan-boy, I quite can't get over the speculation that BV was initially cut to be over four hours, giving me a reason to believe that it is not Anurag's fault on the whole. Because the film is crafted with some genuine pearls that managed to not roll off the editing table once the string broke. The scenes of childhood of both Johnny and Rosie(Anushka) are a particular delight- he is shown as a young kid shouting at a foreigner at the docks asking him to shove it; she is shown as a young girl being taken under the wing of a musician, who treats the scars on her thighs with ointment and his sexual deviance with a whip. Khambata(Karan Johar), Johnny's mentor who manipulates him for his political ascension gets some nice scenes too - the one where he exits a meeting with Johnny and his buddy only to snigger at Johnny's proficiency in English, clearly revealing the skeleton of their relationship; the phone conversation between Johnny and him without a word being spoken by either; the one where his frustration at the gun going empty after firing a couple of shots beautifully meets the fear of being unarmed. Alas, these moments are few and far between in a movie that has multiple plot threads that weave and un-weave themselves uselessly into the proceedings, creating a muddled mess. Cases in point being the involvement of a photo negative that is never really done justice to, the land deal that Khambata has going on or the inevitable inclusion of a twin into the classic Bollywood narrative (we should call it twins ex-machina. Or something). Characters with great potential are treated with very little space to grow on you, like Johnny's childhood friend Chimman (played by the smoldering-eyed Satyadeep Misra), the passively menacing inspector with a playful countenance (played to perfection, as usual, by Kay Kay Menon) or even Rosie's boyish chauffeur Tony (played by you-should-have-stopped-with-7KhoonMaaf Vivaan Shah).
But it is the love story that somehow manages to endear in spite of all this, even if it fails to reach its peak. Johnny and Rosie are kids who never grow up, and particularly Rosie, whose end of innocence is as abrupt as the switching off of the lights in a room, as against us normal kids, for whom it is more gradual, like the setting of the evening sun. And that is why their love story is innocent, immature, brash and delicious - because it is the only way they know how to love. During their first "date", Johnny and Rosie are having ice golas at the beach, where she collects the discarded gola stick of Johnny's to add as an entry to her diary. This is what schoolkids in love do. Intimacy to them is owning a part of the other person's trash, and it is something more beautiful than I can venture to describe. They hurt each other physically, and Rosie even finds it funny that she is capable of hitting him with a chair; Johnny blames her for not being clear enough and leading him to kill a man unnecessarily, to which she responds by saying that she has hurt her ankle; Rosie pokes fun at Johnny by calling him "Johnny Walker" - these are the only moments that truly make you laugh, and be glad that we have the electrifying chemistry between Ranbir and Anushka to complement it. Replace any other pair of actors in these parts and I wouldn't be too sure of how it would have panned out (In case anyone is making a Tamil remake, Dhanush and Nithya Menen would make for an interesting pair). And Anushka should be given an award just for the few seconds of her on-screen rendition of Dhadaam Dhadaam, executed with such pain and agony that I almost moaned in disappointment when the moment passed onto the next scene.
Speaking of Dhadaam Dhadaam, the music by Amit Trivedi is just terrific. Yeah. That's the word - terrific. He makes jazz creep under your skin like no other music director can, creating a modern rock-star out of the exhilarating Neeti Mohan, much like what Rahman did for Mohit Chauhan with Rockstar. If she doesn't win any of the singing awards for this year, then the awards circuit in Bollywood is really as disgustingly rigged as it has been spoken about. All songs find importance (though not all of them are featured), sound organic and fit seamlessly into the narrative (you will especially rave about the placement and treatment of Dhadaam Dhadaam and Darbaan). And the adrenaline rush that is Tommy Gun, the best of the instrumentals, takes the prize for one of the most delicious tracks of this year. But alas, such wasted genius. I had given a hear to the soundtrack almost a month before the movie released and found it too painfully beautiful to bear, only to have the crushing weight of the movie's disappointment trickle out the last breath in me, minute by minute till the end. It's like falling in unrequited love with a breath-taking woman, and witnessing her marry a worthless douche-y a-hole.
Much has already been said about the look of the film and the production design, and I wouldn't want to add to the multitudes in fear of being banal. But that said, if there need be a big budget Bollywood remake of Star Wars or Moulin Rouge!, you know which team to call upon to design the sets. A hat tip to Rajeev Ravi, for the consistently impressive cinematography. My favorite bit, among others, included an early scene in the film, where Anushka runs away from her mentor and boards a bus, which gets attacked by a group of rebels; sitting in the backseat she looks around in befuddlement, and as she turns, we have her slightly injured face transverse the immaculate sunshine - Talk about heralding the arrival of brighter times.
Watch Bombay Velvet if you are a Kashyap loyalist. Watch it if you hate him. Watch it, to know that even giants succumb to the travails of what they always operated away from. In this case - big budgets, stars and schedules.
Shyam Benegal, on describing Pather Panchali said "It had the ability of a great work to make you see the general in the particular and the particular in the general." Kashyap invariably weaves this trait into most of his films, garnishing it with an ingenious objectivity that resulted in modern classics like Black Friday, DevD and Ugly. Here too, we are shown glimpses of this genius (that alas get lost amid the ostensible trappings of a commercial fare). There is a comedic satirist, a regular at the jazz club, poking fun at the socio-economic condition of Reclamation-age Bombay - a trope seldom handled by any other filmmaker. When was the last time you saw a period drama having a comic to hold a mirror to the polity of that time, however relevant it is in reality? "This is just classic unconventional film-making" you start to think, only to have the rug pulled from beneath your feet. And I don't mean it in a good way. The plot is obviously the culprit here. It starts off with an idiosyncratic setup of the political state of 60's Bombay, taking on the inception of Nariman Point as a cultural and historical organ of the city, and interspersing (again, idiosyncratically)it with the blooming of love between two broken souls stuck in adolescence. You are thinking this is Gangs of Wasseypur meets DevD, the jazz version of the masterpiece that is Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, but the story loses its focus well into the second half. Kashyap begins by coloring his love epic with the turbulence of the times it is set in, but runs out of pastels midway through the narration. The second half isn't bad though. It just turns indifferent to the tone that had been setup, and this is BV's greatest failure - it's uncertainty in what it wants to tell. Some twenty minutes into the movie, after quite impressively establishing the lead characters, we are shown a scene where our man Johnny Balraj (Ranbir) is watching James Cagney's The Roaring Twenty's, tearing up at the climax where a dying Cagney lies in the arms of Priscilla Lane, for her to brood - "He was a big shot". It is here where we get a premonition of the familiar path this ill-fated romance will take, and yet we hope that it is done with flourish.
Being a fan-boy, I quite can't get over the speculation that BV was initially cut to be over four hours, giving me a reason to believe that it is not Anurag's fault on the whole. Because the film is crafted with some genuine pearls that managed to not roll off the editing table once the string broke. The scenes of childhood of both Johnny and Rosie(Anushka) are a particular delight- he is shown as a young kid shouting at a foreigner at the docks asking him to shove it; she is shown as a young girl being taken under the wing of a musician, who treats the scars on her thighs with ointment and his sexual deviance with a whip. Khambata(Karan Johar), Johnny's mentor who manipulates him for his political ascension gets some nice scenes too - the one where he exits a meeting with Johnny and his buddy only to snigger at Johnny's proficiency in English, clearly revealing the skeleton of their relationship; the phone conversation between Johnny and him without a word being spoken by either; the one where his frustration at the gun going empty after firing a couple of shots beautifully meets the fear of being unarmed. Alas, these moments are few and far between in a movie that has multiple plot threads that weave and un-weave themselves uselessly into the proceedings, creating a muddled mess. Cases in point being the involvement of a photo negative that is never really done justice to, the land deal that Khambata has going on or the inevitable inclusion of a twin into the classic Bollywood narrative (we should call it twins ex-machina. Or something). Characters with great potential are treated with very little space to grow on you, like Johnny's childhood friend Chimman (played by the smoldering-eyed Satyadeep Misra), the passively menacing inspector with a playful countenance (played to perfection, as usual, by Kay Kay Menon) or even Rosie's boyish chauffeur Tony (played by you-should-have-stopped-with-7KhoonMaaf Vivaan Shah).
But it is the love story that somehow manages to endear in spite of all this, even if it fails to reach its peak. Johnny and Rosie are kids who never grow up, and particularly Rosie, whose end of innocence is as abrupt as the switching off of the lights in a room, as against us normal kids, for whom it is more gradual, like the setting of the evening sun. And that is why their love story is innocent, immature, brash and delicious - because it is the only way they know how to love. During their first "date", Johnny and Rosie are having ice golas at the beach, where she collects the discarded gola stick of Johnny's to add as an entry to her diary. This is what schoolkids in love do. Intimacy to them is owning a part of the other person's trash, and it is something more beautiful than I can venture to describe. They hurt each other physically, and Rosie even finds it funny that she is capable of hitting him with a chair; Johnny blames her for not being clear enough and leading him to kill a man unnecessarily, to which she responds by saying that she has hurt her ankle; Rosie pokes fun at Johnny by calling him "Johnny Walker" - these are the only moments that truly make you laugh, and be glad that we have the electrifying chemistry between Ranbir and Anushka to complement it. Replace any other pair of actors in these parts and I wouldn't be too sure of how it would have panned out (In case anyone is making a Tamil remake, Dhanush and Nithya Menen would make for an interesting pair). And Anushka should be given an award just for the few seconds of her on-screen rendition of Dhadaam Dhadaam, executed with such pain and agony that I almost moaned in disappointment when the moment passed onto the next scene.
Speaking of Dhadaam Dhadaam, the music by Amit Trivedi is just terrific. Yeah. That's the word - terrific. He makes jazz creep under your skin like no other music director can, creating a modern rock-star out of the exhilarating Neeti Mohan, much like what Rahman did for Mohit Chauhan with Rockstar. If she doesn't win any of the singing awards for this year, then the awards circuit in Bollywood is really as disgustingly rigged as it has been spoken about. All songs find importance (though not all of them are featured), sound organic and fit seamlessly into the narrative (you will especially rave about the placement and treatment of Dhadaam Dhadaam and Darbaan). And the adrenaline rush that is Tommy Gun, the best of the instrumentals, takes the prize for one of the most delicious tracks of this year. But alas, such wasted genius. I had given a hear to the soundtrack almost a month before the movie released and found it too painfully beautiful to bear, only to have the crushing weight of the movie's disappointment trickle out the last breath in me, minute by minute till the end. It's like falling in unrequited love with a breath-taking woman, and witnessing her marry a worthless douche-y a-hole.
Much has already been said about the look of the film and the production design, and I wouldn't want to add to the multitudes in fear of being banal. But that said, if there need be a big budget Bollywood remake of Star Wars or Moulin Rouge!, you know which team to call upon to design the sets. A hat tip to Rajeev Ravi, for the consistently impressive cinematography. My favorite bit, among others, included an early scene in the film, where Anushka runs away from her mentor and boards a bus, which gets attacked by a group of rebels; sitting in the backseat she looks around in befuddlement, and as she turns, we have her slightly injured face transverse the immaculate sunshine - Talk about heralding the arrival of brighter times.
Watch Bombay Velvet if you are a Kashyap loyalist. Watch it if you hate him. Watch it, to know that even giants succumb to the travails of what they always operated away from. In this case - big budgets, stars and schedules.
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