യാത്ര

Bombay Talkies (2013) 

Directors: Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar, Karan Johar

Running time: 130 minutes

Bombay Talkies is a 2013 Indian anthology film consisting of four short films, directed by Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Karan Johar. The film released on May 3, 2013, coinciding with and celebrating the centenary year of Indian cinema and the beginning of a new era in modern cinema.

Bombay Talkies serves its principal purpose quite well: each segment of this cinematic anthology underscores in bold relief the defining creative impulses of its maker. 

Karan Johar, in the opening segment, stays put in his comfort zone – in the world of a yuppie couple (Rani Mukherji, entertainment supplement editor; and Randeep Hooda, TV news anchor) and a spunky gay rebel (Saqib Saleem) who turns their married life on its head.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the fourth short film, Anurag Kashyap settles for a characteristically cheeky, earthy and breezy style in telling the story of an Allahabad man (Vineet Kumar Singh) who sets out on an improbable mission to meet his dad’s movie idol, Amitabh Bachchan, and give the superstar a taste of home-made murabba. 

Similarly, while Zoya Akhtar cannot quite break free from the lure of a Bollywood diva (Katrina Kaif) even as she comes up with the unconventional tale of a boy (Naman Jain) who aspires to be a girl, Dibakar Banerjee gives full rein to what he is good at – capturing the joys and despairs of “that little man” in the crowd (Nawazuddin Siddiqui).

It is Banerjee’s short film that seeks to penetrate the heart of the raconteur’s art through the dawn-to-nightfall story of an ordinary man who stumbles upon extraordinary magic in his life, if only for a brief moment, when he strays into a film shoot after a failed job hunt and is roped in for a bit part.

Loosely adapted from a short story by Satyajit Ray (Potol Babu, Film Star), the film is set in a soul-sapping Mumbai where a one-time folk actor from Sangli cannot even find the inspiration to create a simple story that can perk up his listless young daughter.

When the man does rediscover his inner self, Dibakar Banerjee and his lead actor, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, turn the last few minutes of the segment into an exhilarating exhibition of the pure joy of mime and music, extracting every ounce of energy from silent hand and body gestures as the father transmits the excitement of the moment to his entranced daughter. 

The scene plays out to the accompaniment of a soulful instrumental rendition of a lilting Tagore song (Tobu mone rekho), which roughly translates as “even so, remember me if I stray far away; remember me even if old love is suppressed by the mesh of a new affection”. 

Nostalgia, poignance and the depth of the human imagination all gently spring forth from this construct – it becomes a perfect summation of the magic of storytelling and instantly imprints itself on the mind. Nawazuddin is a marvel, a master of mimetic minimalism.

In encapsulating the dreams, disappointments, falsehoods, flashes of truth, elements of emotional artifice and inescapable realities of life, these four stories, each distinct in emotional timbre and visual feel, do present, within their limited ambit, a range of cinematic expressions that are in themselves laudable.