Shamitabh **
Dir: R. Balki. With: Amitabh Bachchan, Dhanush,
Akshara Haasan. 153 mins. Cert: 12A
The Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has been
universally recognised as a voice of authority for some time now: it’s why Baz
Luhrmann cast him as Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim in his Gatsby redo. Back home, however,
Bachchan has partnered with writer-director R. Balki for a trio of films
examining the pitfalls of ageing. After 2007’s crowdpleasing May-to-December
romance Cheeni Kum and 2009’s
peculiar Benjamin Button variant Paa, the new release Shamitabh forms the pair’s most
self-reflexive endeavour yet: a movieland tale that finds Bachchan playing a
former performer whose voice soars over his drastically reduced circumstances.
The Frankensteinian title bolts together the
names of both the lead characters, and the actors who play them. Danish
(Dhanush) is a movie-obsessed mute who sets out from his small village to
Mumbai in the hope of becoming a matinee idol. Discovered by ambitious
assistant director Akshara (Akshara Haasan) while hiding out in a trailer, he’s
soon whisked off to a Finnish laryngotomy clinic – you’ll just have to go with
this – and fitted with an electronic device that allows others to speak in his
place: where Bollywood stars have traditionally lip-synched to pre-recorded
songs, our boy will do all that and
the dialogue.
Danish and Akshaara stumble upon an unlikely
candidate to provide these words: Amitabh (Bachchan), an alcoholic itinerant
renting space in a graveyard – the symbolism is clear – who rather resembles
erstwhile Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, if someone had thought to drag him
through a hedge backwards. A failed leading man whose basso profondo was deemed more suitable for villains than heroes,
Amitabh can’t resist the idea of getting one over on the industry that rejected
him; a promise of 10% of all future profits seals the deal, and thus is the
legend of Shamitabh – desirable face, voice of an undesirable – born.
The tone is affectionate enough for several
prominent Bollywood directors to happily cameo as unwitting dupes, but there
are glimpses of a far less forgiving satire on this industry’s credulousness –
a satire engineered by a director-star pairing who’ve surely seen their fair
share of phonies and fakers come and go. Here, producers incur “numerology
issues” during casting, and one nice slowburn gag reveals just how Shamitabh’s
more than faintly preposterous-looking action flick “Lifebuoy” got its title;
the whole plot, indeed, relies on us buying that Bollywood could go gaga for a
guy with a pretty face but nothing to say for himself.
The shame is that Shamitabh just can’t hold to a coherent line. Balki keeps muffling
his most compelling ideas: the notion that the increasingly resentful Amitabh
might eventually withdraw his consent by keeping schtum as the cameras roll is
floated in one scene, and then forgotten about the next. Having recruited
Bachchan with the apparent aim of making a statement, Balki instead settles for
taking silly, scattershot snipes: spoof musical number “A Piddly Thing”, for
example, extends beyond comic breaking point the idea a heroine might want to
relieve herself while twirling around on a mountaintop.
“Too classy, not massy” is the post-production
warning Haasan’s AD mouths at one point, and Shamitabh veers erratically towards the latter option, losing its
thread repeatedly between hours two and three while in pursuit of some new,
generally lower-brow effect. A tighter edit might have usefully redacted the
demeaning scene in which Bachchan is obliged to provide coital grunts to
soundtrack his vessel’s bedroom activity, and the incessant product-placement
for a certain tax-intolerant online retailer; it might also have given Balki
time to come up with a better ending than the flatly blunt one he arrives at
here.
Bachchan remains a heavyweight presence when
he’s allowed to be, and he sets about one scene, drunkenly berating a bus-side
photo of Robert de Niro, as though this material were Shakespeare. It’s not,
but the encounter does represent something else: a communion between screen
legends whose recent choices have too often felt like cries for help. Somewhere
in Shamitabh, there lurks a veteran
performer’s fear of losing his voice in a marketplace where one has to shout
ever louder to be noticed – and that’s fascinating; what’s frustrating is that
the vehicle through which he’s chosen to express this fear should be such an
unfocused, truly piddly thing.
Shamitabh is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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