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Nothing velvety about this one

A period crime fantasy drama fashioned and styled in a sort of New York & Los Angeles-meets-Bombay fusion, Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet is as ambitious as it is faulty.

Nothing velvety about this one

Free flow: Anushka Sharma and Ranbir Kapoor



Johnson Thomas

A period crime fantasy drama fashioned and styled in a sort of New York & Los Angeles-meets-Bombay fusion, Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet is as ambitious as it is faulty. Strongly influenced by L.A. Quartet, a sequence of four crime novels by James Ellroy, set in the late 1940s through the late 1950s in Los Angeles and admittedly fused with Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables, the script tries to do much more than it should in it’s attempt to romanticise and encapsulate the internecine struggles and events that surrounded the making of Mumbai as we see it today.

The film begins with sepia tinted FD footage of old Bombay while the credits roll on and then cuts to 1949 with headlines of Gandhi’s assassination and the Godse trial while in the foreground a mother and child, the young Johnny Balraj, disembark from a Northern Railway train. A few steps out of the station, she begs for a job from a passerby. Cut to a young girl, Rosie singing in a church in Portuguese- occupied-Goa and catching the attention of a sexually divergent Portuguese man (Remo), who offers to adopt and train her for a musical future. 

A few more exposition shots detailing their childhood experiences and then a jump cut to their adult selves. Rosie (Anushka Sharma) bashes her oppressor over the head and escapes into a den of inequity and Bobby Balraj lives in a brothel and gets embroiled with the low-life of the upcoming megapolis while moonlighting as a street fighter by night. Their lives are of course meant to be intertwined with the history of the growing city. 

A natty CBI sleuth (Kay Kay Menon) does the honors thereafter while Johnny is given free licence to go on the kill before the final comeuppance. The film is beautifully mounted no doubt, but the detailing is inadequate. Also, the digital masking of Mumbai high-rises from the Marine Drive skyline doesn’t come off convincingly. The attempt to stick to close-ups for the Bombay inferences only makes the experience just a little too claustrophobic and uncomfortable. 

The costumes especially those worn by the lead don’t befit the period (they reek of designer labels) and the styling is quite haphazard too. Rosie’s hairstyles are fine but Johnny’s looks like he had perma-frost applied in an attempt to ape the MGR look. The distinctive sound design and the jazz score are quite elevating though. Manipulative plotting and confounding set-ups lead you on a merry chase that ends up in blood and gore. It’s a spectacle that doesn’t carry much weight though. There’s passion and fury but both amount to being unjustified. The performances too leave you cold. Ranbir is unclear whether he wants to ape Raj Kapoor or Al Pacino. Anushka’s lacks guile—a much needed requisite for a performer. The romance is clichéd and the chemistry between the two is also quite thanda even given the fact that they are shown together in several passionate clinches. Karan Johar is the weakest link here. As Kaizad Khambatta, a media moghul-cum-power broker of sorts, he is out-of-place in the milieu and looks uncomfortable right through. The rest of the cast do duty as expected but none of them stand out and can be reckoned with save for Satyadeep Misra as Chimman, Balraj’s childhood friend.

Bombay Velvet, though resplendent in ambition, lacks a sense of purpose other than the obvious leap-of-progression for the director.

Post interval, things get a lot more confusing with the romance and intrigue falling apart and violence and mayhem taking full control of the narrative. It’s a convoluted mess that just doesn’t make much sense. Ambition is appreciable but to waste a Rs 80 crore budget on self-indulgent fantasising is hara-kiri in my book. This is one Anurag Kashyap film that just doesn’t get it right! 

 

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