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Monday, October 7, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD LUCK BY CHANCE
EDITOR'S PICK
Rating: ****
It is easy to fall in love with every
performance in this intimate yet generic insider`s look at the workings of the
entertainment industry.
But the one that I carried home with me was Sheeba Chadha. A marvel of subtle
writing, Sheeba plays a podgy, cunning but simple-hearted producer`s
sister-in-law whose husband (Aly Khan) is carrying on with a struggling starlet
right under her naïve eyes.
One not-so-pleasant afternoon, Sheeba barges into her husband`s van and sees a
red-nosed bleary-eyed Konkona Sen Sharma (who has just been told she doesn`t get
a role she has been waiting all her career for). Sheeba senses what`s going on.
But she quickly digresses her mind from her husband`s extra-marital affair.
The industry is filled with such deliberately desensitised people who function
within the fickle and frighteningly flamboyant film industry with gut-wrenching
self-delusion.
"Luck By Chance" -- a truly out-of-the-box outstanding work of subtle,
sly, satirical and whispering art -- is filled with people whom you`re bound to
have met in the fetid corridors of Bollywood or the Hindi film industry, as the
star-mother Dimple Kapadia insists on calling it.
Never before has the film industry been perceived with such intuitively
internalised abundance. A subtle splendour galvanised by performances that range
from the credible to the incredible takes the narrative to pinnacles of
expressiveness.
The performances help to ignite the characters into states of subtle yet vivid
shades. The ambitious mother-daughter (Dimple-Isha Sharwani) pair, the
strugglers, wannabes and losers...oh yes, every character in "Luck By
Chance" possesses a luminously lived-in quality, bringing to the surface
feelings, thoughts and images that are normally not brought out on screen.
Every player -- parodic, poignant and pitched perfectly -- makes savage fun of
the very foibles that they probably practice with masterful manipulative hands
in real life.
Zoya Akhtar gets into the star space without a moment`s aggression in her
storytelling. The moments that define the relationships are built stealthily.
This is a world that every person in the Mumbai film industry (for Dimple`s
sake, let`s not call it Bollywood!) knows first-hand.
The debutante director occupies that space with unostentatious spirit, nurturing
interludes between characters (the two strugglers Farhan Akhtar-Konkona,
producer-wife Rishi Kapoor-Juhi Chawla, ideologically separated co-actors
Farhan-Arjun Mathur) with the cautious care of a mother who wants to bring up
her child with the right values without drawing attention to her nurturing
acumen.
This is a work of tender, subtle care with moments whose immense value strikes
you after the wonderfully conversational dialogues (Javed Akhtar at his
expressive best) have had their say.
At heart, "Luck By Chance" is a story of one man`s plunge into the
morass of compromise as he heads towards his dreams. Farhan gets what can only
called another chance to do the histrionic dance. As he goes from wide-eyed
wannabe to a morally devalued creature, the narrative charts his course with
savage humour.
Farhan`s scenes with the nakedly adulatory star daughter(Isha playing dumb
dead-on) are designed as a blend of satirical erotica and ideological
annihilation. Farhan gets it right.
This is a work that oozes outstanding acting talent from every nook and corner.
Whether it`s Aly as a on-the-move producer or Arjun as a struggling actor who
would rather struggle in theatre than compromise, every character plays a person
you`ve met if you`ve ever been a part of the Mumbai film industry.
Super stand-out performances by Rishi, Dimple, Sheeba, Hrithik Roshan(as a
superstar on the skids) and of course, Konkona, whose best performance this is.
On the deficit side, (yes even a film of such high order must face the music)
the narrative with its inbuilt jokes and references is too much a Bollywood
insider`s job, largely inaccessible to the common man who wouldn`t know the name
of Ranbir Kapoor`s secretary and couldn`t care less.
On most levels, "Luck By Chance" stands tall and luminous, portraying
the world of arclights with a synthesis of style, sympathy and substance that is
the opposite of the synthetic way the world of showbiz is generally portrayed in
cinema.
What stays with you are moments like the one where the struggling hero
approaches the once glamorous star mother at a party and wins her over... a
moment that builds up into a muffled explosion of ambitious scheming achieved at
a place where the sound of broken hearts is inaudible.
A starlet and a struggler meet while trying to navigate through the Hindi Film Industry and end up changing each other`s lives forever.
Luck by Chance is a slice of film industry life, in which self advancement is the sole motivator. Here, nations of superstition, fate and destiny may underline every decision but it the gigantic egos, the grand desires and the small opportunities that converge to form strange patterns. Patterns that we call kismat.
In such an unpredictable climate, is success and failure what other`s define for you or is it something you decide for yourself?
