The film can be seen as a companion piece to ‘Luck By Chance’. It follows a bunch of ordinary folks whose lives revolve around cinema. They make movies, and the movies make them. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) is a wedding videographer in the sleepy town of Malegaon, which looks and feels like a Muslim neighbourhood of Malgudi. One evening, he takes the girl he loves to a movie starring Bruce Lee. She’s more practical: she says the star died early. But Nasir is a romantic: Bruce Lee, the man, may be dead, but Bruce Lee, the performer, is still kicking ass on screen. This is the emotional core of Superboys of Malegaon, written by Varun Grover and directed by Reema Kagti. People die, but actors are immortal. Nasir’s brother dismisses his interest in cinema as a hobby, “jaise ladkiyan sweater bunti hain”. The flavour in the line made me smile. He also warns Nasir that dreams come true only in the movies, not in real life. But Nasir, as we have established, is a romantic, and his growth as a scrappy filmmaker is charted beautifully.
Nasir sees a video shop selling “halal” and “haram” tapes. I thought the latter referred to porn, but it doesn’t – and what it is is part of what makes this story so innocent, so sweet. Through these tapes, Nasir learns the magic of editing, of putting scenes together and making movies. In one scene, Chaplin is in the boxing ring, dodging an opponent. CUT TO: Bruce Lee in the ring, knocking out Chuck Norris. Decades have been bridged by a single cinematic technique. Nasir’s eye is so cinematic that he feels he has to do something when the bride and groom are seated glumly at a wedding reception. He wants his camera to capture some event, some drama. He arranges for an impromptu lightsperson, he arranges for a prop (a gulab jamun that the bride can give the husband), and he zooms in. He gets his drama.
He gets more drama than he wanted when the cops raid his small theatre, calling his home-edits piracy. Nasir decides to make his own, full-blown movie: “Apni picture, apna theatre.” You may think that the rest of Superboys of Malegaon will tell the story of the numerous hurdles Nasir has to overcome to achieve this dream – but the film has other ideas. Yes, for a while we see Nasir and his band of merry misfits – a worker at a loom factory, a seller of dry fruits, a frustrated poet – put together a parody of Sholay. Why a comedy? Because there’s too much rona-dhona in Malegaon. As Nasir’s friend Shafique (Shashank Arora) says: Shauk paal ke kya karega / Malegaon mein tu marega. In the face of this bleakness, where “hamari kismat mein kaanta laga hai” could not just be a line but the town’s motto, a dacoit named Rubber Singh is just what’s needed. Nasir and his friends set about making their version on Sholay, with a camera mounted on a bicycle.
But slowly we begin to realise that this film is a kinda-sorta companion piece to Luck By Chance. If Zoya Akhtar, with her intimate knowledge of how things work, made a commentary on the movies from the inside, Reema’s commentary comes from the outside. (It befits Reema, an outsider who worked her way in.) The opening credits reminded me of that earlier film, in the way it slowly and surely deposits us in an ecosystem. There are laughs, sure, but Superboys of Malegaon, is finally a tragicomedy. There’s a wonderfully wistful tone about it. This is a story about a hit director thinking he doesn’t need a writer. It’s about that writer finding films to be his only creative outlet, as his other writings have been sold as scrap. It’s about how friendships form and grow apart around the movies. It’s about how even a wannabe heroine establishes her primacy in the scheme of things. Every morning, she demands orange juice.
The scene with this “heroine” is so lovely. Nasir approaches her for the role after seeing her dance to Tezaab’s ‘Ek do teen’ number on stage. (The outside world of cinema is very much a part of whatever happens in Malegaon’s world of cinema.) She lays down a list of demands, and after he agrees and leaves, she exhales. She seems to have been holding in her breath, putting on a “performance” for Nasir’s sake, and now that this performance has paid off, her face is filled with happiness. Friendships, enmities, love – everything is directed with this kind of delicacy. There’s always a layer of direction above the writing, and there’s always a layer of writing under the direction. One wouldn’t exist without the other. This is one of the meta points of this movie.
The cinema references come about organically. For instance, original films have fewer takers than movies based on existing material. The Shashank Arora character is fascinated by planes, and in the end, he finds out he can fly. The poet played by Vineet Kumar Singh has to accept the bitter truth that his “pure screenplay” is going to be compromised by vulgar, on-screen advertising, and that his mastery over the works of Mirza Ghalib isn’t going to get him anywhere in the movies. But films alone cannot sustain life, as Nasir discovers. He marries a woman (Muskkaan Jaferi) he does not love, but slowly, he comes to realise that perhaps what matters more is a partner’s understanding nature, her willingness to be part of his dreams even as her own path takes her elsewhere. Elsewhere, we see that friends may grow apart, but when a parent dies, these differences are temporarily put aside.
The film opens in 1997, stops in 2004, and ends in 2010. The flow and the time passages are beautifully choreographed by editor Anand Subaya. Superboys of Malegaon is a tribute not just to cinema but also to Faiza Ahmad Khan’s 2008 documentary, Supermen of Malegaon, which had the real-life Nasir and all these other characters making movies in Malegaon to get away from their bleak reality. Adarsh Gourav and Vineet Kumar Singh have the most well-defined characters, but all the actors are aces. You feel sad when someone says that the first time he felt good waking up was when he was shooting a movie. And you feel happy that he saw his dream come true. When Nasir screens his movie, he tells his audience: “Jo bhi banaya, dil se banaya.” Reema Kagti can say the same. She’s made a movie from the heart, a movie that’s all heart.
