Movie Review: Bombay Talkies
This pizza has four slices, the toppings on each of them is a tad different from the others. You never seem fulfilled with only one slice and always look forward to the next one. Each one has been cooked specially for you by different chefs and each chef has his own peculiarity to deliver. It completely depends on you which slice you like the most but be sure that you would hate none.
What happens when four film makers like Dibakar Bannerjee, Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar and Karan Johar come together to celebrate 100 years of Bollywood? All they do is to make sure that you become a part of that celebration. When I walked into the movie hall, I had high expectation from the movie. And when the high expectations are met with brilliant narration, the experience is no less that exhilarating.
Karan Johar knits a beautiful and sensitive narration of a bunch of urbanes finding eventual solace in realities that they find hard to face. He does an absolute stunning job in the genre of relationships and the music deftly carries the movie forward. Dibakar Bannerjee’s movie starts with his trademark colloquialism and then takes us through the pangs of reality through the lens of a person who earns a living by selling eggs but is unintentionally drawn into a tiny sequence of a movie film. Nawazuddin Siddiqui delivers a stellar performance. Bannerjee’s hold on his characters and sheer simplicity makes an outstanding impression.
Straight after an intermission, you are drawn into the kids’ world through Zoya Akhtar’s deft lenses. She manages to carry the essence of the life of teenagers and through simplicity even manages to convince her audience. But then I was expecting a lot more. I found its essence pretty much bizarre for the comprehension of most of us. Simply because hardly anyone of us would have thought the way she makes her characters think, even in childhood.
Anurag Kashyap’s movie is a powerhouse, right from the beginning till the end you are always with the story, in fact inside it almost. You can feel the character he builds, who to fulfil his father’s ultimate wish undertakes a journey to meet the movie legend Amitabh Bachhan to make him eat the ‘murabba’ which his father intends to eat bit by bit all through the rest of his life, hence becoming Mr. Bacchan’s ‘Shabri’. It may seem a little too simplistic but it keeps on building and the ending leaves you absolutely spellbound with a smirk on the side of your lips.
The trailer of the movie claimed that the movie would be ‘celebrating the emotion of Bollywood’ ….and without doubts, it does justice to every single syllable of the epithet.
