Bombay Velvet (2015)
Anurag Kashyap
Hindi
What struck me most about Anurag Kashyap’s unanimously derided Bombay Velvet was how thoroughly unoriginal it is. Right from the history of Bombay-that-might-have-been to the black eye that Johnny (Ranbeer Kapoor) carries, the film builds a relentlessly artificial world far from the realist trappings of Gangs of Wasseypur (2012). The universe of Bombay Velvet is media-saturated, drowned in cinematic codes that paint a portrait of the city as a jarring mix of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York movies. So this reimagining of Bombay as a sort of Hollywoodized America has as a welcome and perhaps unintended consequence of defamiliarizing the city, giving it a new foundational myth akin to that of America at the turn of last century – a perennially rootless territory that actively erases traces of its past, a new world for those who wish to cast off their social identities and chase a new dream and a promised land of real estate rush and hedonist abandon. The lasting effect, however, is that of a simulacrum, a Disneyland. It all finally has the air of a cinephilic wish fulfillment project that imagines how great it would have been had Scorsese made a film on Bombay. Films as cinephilic navel-gazing is not new and there is nothing wrong about them either, but this one comes across less like a cinephile infusing his material with his movie loves than him incarnating his movie loves through indifferent material. When he cites Raoul Walsh, it feels less like a tribute to his formative movie experiences than a tribute to Scorsese paying tribute to his formative movie experiences. This kind of double quotation completely erases Kashyap’s authorship, but not in any subversive way. But this was to be expected of a generation of filmmakers fed on New Hollywood. The Movie Brats, thanks partly to the French New Wave, plundered classical cinema for personal use and emptied its signifiers of any meaning outside cinephilia. And films that tend to pillage these already pillaged films are very likely to come out the way Bombay Velvet has. One gets the feeling Kashyap would perhaps have liked to belong to Scorsese’s generation. The lament is understandable: it is desirable to have grown up on cinema than cinephilia.
The Seventh Art 
May 19, 2015 at 1:50 pm
This Film is a carbon copy of Paul Muni’s 1932 Film “SCARFACE”
LikeLike
May 19, 2015 at 3:42 pm
‘As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be Martin Scorsese…’
LikeLike
May 19, 2015 at 3:43 pm
That’s it!
LikeLike
May 21, 2015 at 4:14 am
Hi, just saw this. Great point about the abstraction of Bombay. But from what you said earlier, I got the impression that that thing worked for you, whereas this piece seems to suggest otherwise.
Where would you place BV in Kashyap’s filmography, vis-a-vis Black Friday/No Smoking/Gulaal/Dev.D and others?
LikeLike
May 21, 2015 at 10:45 am
Yes, the strategy interested me and still does. But I felt it was not pursued further and the film was happy just hi-fiving itself with this reinterpretation.
I haven’t seen a number of his films – Black Friday, Gulaal, Yellow Boots, Ugly. But I’d say BV is perhaps the least appealing of his films alongside DEV D. I really liked NO SMOKING and the second part of GoW.
LikeLike
May 22, 2015 at 3:19 am
Oh, you absolutely must see Black Friday. I’m not the biggest of Kashyap fans, but Black Friday is a coup. As for his least appealing films, I’d vote for Paanch, Yellow Boots and GoW-2 (which just came across to me as very silly and a “let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” exercise. Cooks up some very interesting set-pieces but goes on and on and on, stretching each initially interesting scene till it starts getting annoying)
LikeLike