Bombay Velvet: Inspired Madness

The closest we came to hearing jazz in a Hindi film in the ‘70s, was when Amitabh Bachchan’s dock-worker turned underworld apprentice Vijay, smoked away his foreboding in a bar; and Parveen Babi in a red gown slithered close to him with ‘I am falling in love with stranger’ playing in the background. The film was Deewar and the RD Burman tuned song can now be heard in  its full velvet, sinuous glory on YouTube. Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet is the longer version of that song. And so  much more. It may be based on  Gyan Prakash’s book Mumbai Fables and inspired by James Elroy’s LA Quartet but it is Kashyap’s tribute to the angry young man born in the vortex of need and greed that we first saw in Raj Kapoor’s Awara (whose most popular song is heard in a snatch in one scene) and Guru Dutt’s noir films like  Baazi  and CID (directed by Raj Khosla and produced by Dutt).

The film’ s heroine Rosie, named after many unfortunate molls in Hindi films, even sings the bar ditty from CID, ‘jaata kahan hai deewane’ in a key moment. There are the obvious Deewar references. The film is a lavish tribute also to Scorsese, to Coppola, Raoul Walsh (whose film, The Roaring Twenties defines the aspirational span of our hero who wants to die memorably, as a Big Shot in the arms of the woman he loves) to Baz Luhrmann perhaps even to his own personal deity, Tarantino. Even Manmohan Desai whose  Johnny (Amitabh Bachchan) in Naseeb boxed for some extra money and for the thrill of hearing the chants of ,’ Johnny…Johnny’’  from an adrenaline drunk audience.

It is also a summary of the  games unscrupulous men played when Bombay was finding its feet. We saw child friendly versions of these games in the films of the seventies where suave, well-spoken smugglers and dons used hungry-for-vindication human chess pieces to make their moves on a growing city. Hotels and clubs served as glossy facades for underhand deals. Double crossing cronies and dangerous business rivals plotted murder. The lust for tall spires and the desire to rule a once cruel and now subservient city, ruined lives.

But above and beyond all this, this is a film that no one makes in Bollywood anymore. A film driven by near blind passion for the obsessive detailing of a story that does not play it safe in any department and dares to be something we have come to not expect from our makers. Raw bravado that cocks a snook at the sloppy dispassion with which we tell and hear stories today. The one thing Kashyap gets right with this film is his contextualisation of evil. Unlike in Dev D and many other films where he paints humanity in dark, ugly smears, here he tells you why a tender child in a cruel city grows up to be cruel.

This is not Awara’s Raju who is criminalised when he steals food for his mother. This is boy who sees the mother figure brutalised in a brothel and is cheated by her.  Who finds that he cannot aspire to love or acceptance or riches, because he is a nobody. Ranbir Kapoor’s Johnny Balraj is like  a younger De Niro in Godfather 2, crossed with James Caan’s Santino Corleone and sprinkled over with the charm of Raj Kapoor. Everything from his hair to his walk to his bearing is a living human story and Kapoor is pure performance genius in the film.

But coming back to Kashyap’s understanding of the human darkness, there is Rosie whose angelic voice lands her into abuse and exploitation as a child and continues to lead her to dehumanising situations till she is found by Johnny. Only by then, both of them have lost their humanity and innocence too. There is Kaizad Khambata, played by a shockingly good Karan Johar who has lived with as much deprivation and privilege and will stop at nothing to control the most powerful men in the city so that he can feel less pusillanimous. There are perhaps just three characters who retain their humanity to some extent. One of them is Satyadeep Misra who imbues his Chimman with great gravitas and integrity. The other is the effortlessly brilliant Vivaan Shah and then there is the woman who plays Chimman’s wife. Anushka as Rosie demonstrates why she is one of the finest young actors we have today and how easily she can catch the heartbeat of a character.

The Bombay of the ‘60s is painted in lush hues and every scene is a labour of passion. This is a film that cannot be summed up in a review but must be seen with complete absorption to be appreciated. Watch it for Rajiv Ravi’s cinematography, Amit Trivedi’s music, its production design, for the performances, but most of all for Kashyap who has created something masterful with a story that has been told many times, but never with this much swagger, this amount of intensity and style. It also revisits the conflict between the haves and have-nots in a city where the rich and the famous closed rank behind a hit and run accused while hoping that the poor would be given separate streets to sleep in. That Bombay where Johnny Balraj first arrived as a have-not, may have become Mumbai, but it has not changed its spots. Not really.