It was when I first gazed at Ray Liotta's impeccable shoes in Goodfellas that I felt, briefly, that same sinfully thrilling desire to be a gangster.
Unlike Francis Ford Coppola's moody and melancholic The Godfather series, which featured men clad in suits spun of silk brooding over their stony-hearted intentions, Martin Scorsese' masterpiece, with its feverish stylistic flourishes inspired by the French New Wave and a rocking-and-rolling, swinging tenor inspired by the cult London gangster yarn Performance, is like a sinful, nihilistic orgy of violence, coarse language and hedonism, both a delirious celebration and a damning indictment of the dangerous allure of crime. When we see Liotta's Henry Hill literally gatecrash his way into the Copacabana with his the wide-eyed Lorraine Bracco on his arm, we cannot help but gaze wistfully with wonder and wish that we too were among the titular wise-guys; no matter how black-hearted these suavely dressed men might turn out to be, they make for irresistible company.
Johnny Balraj, the unforgettable anti-hero of Anurag Kashyap's Bombay Velvet, is like all those who swooned over Liotta's shoes, the way he smuggled his lady love (whose eyes he thought to be like Liz Taylor) into the Copacabana or how his hair trigger temper against a lascivious neighbour was enough to win her over completely. Watching The Roaring Twenties, he is thrilled and seduced in equal measure by the way James Cagney's smartly dressed big-city crook pummels fellow crooks on the silver screen, makes big money and then, shot by a righteous and ruthless policeman, dies dramatically on the steps of a building while his lady love, with a tear-streaked face, sobs and laments that, 'He was a big shot'. By then, Balraj is no longer merely infatuated. He is obsessed.
Obsession, of a self-destructive nature is one theme that Kashyap, more than any other cinematic storyteller, understands perfectly. His films deal with it in ways both direct and indirect; it is there in the urban dystopia of Dev D, Ugly, Raman Raghav 2.0 and No Smoking, in the mofussil anarchy of Gulaal and Gangs Of Wasseypur as a toxic and heady fuel that drives his men and women on a path of nihilism that leaves them battered and bruised. More than those films, however, it is Balraj's obsession - rising above his scrappy status as a streetwise goon to the dizzying, sky-scraping heights of ambition and affluence - that makes Bombay Velvet so resonant and believable as a study of delusional ambition and bravado and how it can be both agonising and ecstatic, poisonous and beautiful.
But then, that is the eternal truth of Bombay itself, a city that has eternally handed over a treasure of opportunities to generations of strugglers to rise to glorious heights but not before plunging them to the grim, sordid realities of the streets. In this film, the city is crystallised like a tableau of a specific period and milieu and yet, the thesis to which Kashyap arrives is still prescient: Bombay can either give birth to indefatigable kings who remain impregnable in their concrete fortresses or street slackers without even a roof above their heads.
Balraj, one such slacker, does not quite settle for this truism, though. He is hell-bent against all odds to live out his cinematic, larger-than-life fantasy of being a big shot and for that, he is willing to throw away the few shreds of innocence that he once had. Parallel to his track is the more heartrending story of Rosie Noronha, herself as much an outcaste and a struggler as Balraj but unlike him resilient, strong-willed and determined to keep her dignity on. The film swooshes majestically in the initial sequences over these two desolate, desperate souls with assured ease; the editing by the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker (herself a veteran of many a Scorsese classic) and Prerna Saigal splices their moments of disillusionment and brief snatches of stolen delight with pure mastery; he is beaten black and blue inside the grimy cages of the city's underbelly while she is nearly cowed down by abusive and domineering men.
At heart, Kashyap's film is about these two loners alone with everything pitted against them. That brings us the heady flavour of the classic Bombay films helmed by the likes of Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, which were essentially about a cocksure young man and a demure but strong-willed woman left to fend for themselves in the streets. And as in those vintage films, Johnny and Rosie are sucked slowly into a bigger conspiracy afoot, populated by rival newspaper tycoons Kaizad Khambatta (Karan Johar, smarmy, effete and surprisingly effective at the same time) and Jimi Mistry (Manish Chaudhry, compellingly silken and stiff-lipped), officious but ludicrously indulgent politicians and even slightly jaded communists in a labyrinthine scramble for the reclaimed land on which the city's rests.
The thickening narrative, co-written by fellow cinephile Vasan Bala and noted city chronicler Gyan Prakash, makes for a rollicking, if slightly disorienting and dizzying, ride rich with sumptuous cinematic pleasures. Rajeev Ravi's cinematography paints Sonal Sawant's painstakingly retro-fitted sets and interiors in hues of dazzling gold and neon and melancholic sepia, capturing the unmistakable flavour of a city in a particular time of history. Living up to its title, Bombay Velvet, even when stumbling occasionally in keeping up with its characters, never misses a lingering gaze of a city on the throes of transformation as a cultural and social melting pot, a place where, suitable enough for the cinephile and aficionado inside Kashyap, east literally meets west.
Much of this is possible by the dazzling sleight of hand by the director, his co-writers and his crew. Balraj is cut out alike both the cynical anti-heroes that Dutt played in his capers from the 1950s and Raj Kapoor's ambitious Raju from Shree 420. But in his hot-blooded temper and compulsive obsession, he also resembles, even physically, Robert De Niro from Raging Bull. In that memorable film, again helmed by Scorsese, De Niro's Jake La Motta bludgeons his rivals inside his ring to be deemed as enough of a contender for the big shots outside it, the smarmy, sleazy gangsters who paw and slobber over his prize wife.
Then again, he is also propelled by the inexorable obduracy of its creator; his rise against all odds and difficulties and his defiance of the bigwigs who constantly tell him what to do mirrors Kashyap's own personal struggle for acceptance and recognition in a film industry that cares little for creativity or raw talent and is dominated by nepotism and snobbery. Add to that the performer's own sizzling, almost incendiary talent for playing men-child who won't take things lying down and you have quite a character on your hands. Ranbir Kapoor is flawless as Balraj, turning in a performance of malicious charisma and heartbreaking bravado, of coolly assured swagger and an explosive temper that stems from a very real sense of boyish impudence. His body language is pitch-perfect too, from the way he, with his starstruck eyes and lazy shoulder, mentions that both the girl and the club belong to him to staring, with almost slobbering infatuation, at Rosie, almost willing to bare his bleeding heart for her.
Anushka Sharma is equally brilliant as Noronha, bravely silent and seething for a major chunk of the film and letting her tremendous balance of restraint and will to lend her sad-eyed songstress, based largely on Bombay jazz legend Lorna Cordeiro, real gravitas of depth and dignity. The real-life origins of her character also give Kashyap and his co-writers a chance to further ground the sweeping eloquence to reality. Cordeiro was head over heels in love with her manager Chris Perry, himself possibly one of the working models for Balraj, with a fiery, flustering temper and a tendency to get into brawls every now and then. Then again, Kashyap is equally deft in blending Eastern and Western cinema and pulp literature into the same rollicking cocktail quite smoothly. The film boasts of an epic sweep akin to a Salman Rushdie novel (the legendary confectioner Bombelli's features in the film as it did in Midnight's Children and the fragile balance between extravagance and ghetto-level grit is also uncannily similar) but, with a narrative populated by suavely dressed and forever plotting scoundrels and femme fatales, is closer to James Elroy in spirit. Similarly, there is a hint of Manmohan Desai (Balraj's first name and fists of fury come from Amitabh Bachchan in Naseeb) to the occasionally masala contrivances that come in the second half but ultimately, like Scorsese' Gangs Of New York, this is very much a credible portrait of a city caught in the tumult of a demographic upheaval.
It is the magnificent music composed by Amit Trivedi, sung by such fine talents like Neeti Mohan and Shefali Alvares and penned sharply, almost in hard-hitting astuteness by Amitabh Bhattacharya, that aids so much of the staggering craft, the compelling performances and even the sheer ambition of Kashyap's film masterfully. The soundtrack is not merely an impassioned love ode to jazz that played in Bombay's clubs and hotels in the days of yore but it is, as in other two director-and-composer collaborations Dev D and Manmarziyan, an essential narrative device itself. The songs are exquisitely poetic and poignant, with Trivedi's orchestral, alternately melancholic and sensuous swells blended beautifully with Bhattacharya's cruelly sharp and cynical words that evoke, like the songs of Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s, the unmistakable sense of the tumultuous times of that particular epoch.
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