Bollywood Calling

Bollywood Calling is two simultaneous films poking fun at Bollywood, which is a bit unfair because India's most famous and prolific industry is not only left utterly defenceless, it is also shown without any redeeming relief. The film's not-so-hidden agenda is to show all that is mindless, arbitrary and overrated in Bollywood. And like in most films with an agenda, here too the agenda takes over at the cost of the film being faithful to reality or its artful exaggeration.

Ironically, the poking fun bit also takes on the same laboured climacterics of a so-called masala film, from a cliched outsider's point of view. Before Kukunoor came calling, there was Kaizad Gustad who arrived, somewhere from his expatriate foxhole (which is supposed to give them an outsider's perspective), with a similar intent of 'exposing' Bollywood. But his expose didn't so much as open eyes and tickle the public imagination—despite being original and funny in parts. That's because Bombay Boys had nothing really new or hugely rib-tickling on offer. Yes it was fun, with jokes that made sense to the elite but beyond that the screen went spectacularly blank.

This one takes the Gustad (or outsider) formula a step further and makes a film that is as silly as the object of its ridicule. Like Gustad's debut, this one too fails because it magnifies the same old time-tested flaws of the 'masala' film industry without filling you in on anything memorable or unique. It's a bit like lamenting the absence of art in Hindi films. The argument gets too generic, no one's interested in that. The problem with Bollywood Calling is that it gets so caught up in counting the warts in the underbelly that the story becomes something of a checklist of woes. The film opens with a hung-over Pat Stormare (Pat Cusick), a near-alcoholic, an out-of-work actor in Hollywood's rigidly-tiered star system. That changes when his agent gets him an undeniably chunky role in a Bollywood flick, called Maut, courtesy Subra (Om Puri), a visiting producer from you-know-where. In Bollywood, Pat is a star simply because he represents Hollywood. No prizes for guessing what Maut is about—it's about two brothers separated at birth and who, by some quirk of fate and clime, turn out to be as different as chalk and cheese: one's brown and the other's white, one's a ravine warlord and the other, we dunno. On the sets of the film, Pat meets an ageing thespian, Manu Kumar (Navin Nischol), who's living it up in Bollywood doing silly films (much like some real-life thespians). And the beautiful Kajal (newcomer and the film's surprise talent, Perizaad Zorabian) who amazes Pat with her comatose conscience, which Pat finds out after he sleeps with her. Pat is recently estranged from his wife and is wrongly convinced that he is moribund, and is therefore faced with questions about life and death, which he surprisingly finds in the mire of Mumbai filmdom.

The film has its moments of light-heartedness, but on the whole it is not even close to being called a great film. See it if you have run out of films to watch.