BOMBAY VELVET MOVIE REVIEW

 

The authentic period production design, the consistently glowing color tone employed by DoP Rajeev Ravi, the apt props, some intelligent and pacy edit patterns by Prerna Saigal and the Academy Award winning Thelma Schoonmaker (a Martin Scorsese regular), the flashy costumes and styling of the lead characters & the unconventional and jazzy music score of Amit Trivedi are among the many aces that Bombay Velvet has. Interestingly the film was predominantly shot in Sri Lanka on sets replicating the Bombay of yore, with just a portion of the film actually shot in the city. 

 

The lead actors, Ranbir and Anushka, invest their heart and soul into the film and Karan tries his best to play the high-profile business magnet, who is the main villain in the tale. Anushka looks the part as the glamorous jazz singer who is eye-candy for all men around. The sensual vocals of Neeti Mohan have been given life on screen by Anushka with the right attitude and lip-sync. Ranbir is a bundle of energy, and as the street smart and ambitious 'Bombaywala' he gets the dialect and the body language right. 

 

But despite all these talking points, the film fails as the characters don't emotionally move us. When the tale ends, we aren't impacted in any way and that's where the screenplay has fallen like nine pins. The film has few moments to savor and at more than 2 hours and 30 minutes, tedium sets in quite often. The second half is the better of the two and that's when the conflicts and resolutions play out. The first half takes its own elaborately sweet time to set up all the characters and as Anurag himself has credited, the traces of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas are evident. And Ranbir's styling (with the artificially curled hair) and his profession as a local street boxer also may have been influenced by Scorsese - Robert De Niro's Raging Bull.

 

The plot of the film is set in the time after India's independence and takes us till the late 60s when Bombay is in the process of emerging as the most happening city in the country where ambitious capitalists and other small-time go-getters like fighters and singers try their luck at becoming big-shots. The opposition from communists, corrupt politicos, nosy journalists and the inefficient cops are also part of the mix. We also have an intimate chemistry-brimming romance between the lead characters and they also have their own axes to grind, thereby making the plot sound very promising on paper. It had the potential to turn out as a delicious drama with all the right actors and terrific technical values in place. But Anurag seems to have lost the plot, in all his intentions to make a grand and glossy product flowing with extravagance.

 

As said earlier Amit Trivedi's music is a big standout and he seems to have been impacted big time by the recent 'Whiplash' as he has used a fabulously pulsating drums score for the movie's violent Tarantino-esque finale when the inevitable happens in sequence. Jazz music is a character by itself and for many sequences, the songs take the narrative forward. The album of this film is definitely a collector's item and with the right mood and setting, the songs are sure to resonate.

 

To sum up Bombay Velvet is a sad case of all the promise not being fulfilled and potential being wasted. The effort put in by the crew and the actors is immense. If only, the basics of a film i.e. story and screenplay had more bite !