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2 - Relocating Bollywood: Gully Boy and the Worlds of Hip-hop

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2023

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Summary

Luck by Chance (2009), Zoya Akhtar's debut film and a commercial flop, is not the first film made about the Mumbai film industry. Nor is it the first to reveal its dark underside roiled by opportunism, hypocrisy and an insider culture indifferent to genuine artistry and fresh talent. As is to be expected in the ‘movies about the movie business’ subgenre, disenchantment is a predominant narrative and affective payoff. Both protagonists, the one who makes it (Vikram [Farhan Akhtar]) and the one who supposedly does not (Sona [Konkona Sen Sharma]), learn, along with the audience, that talent and ability have very little to do with success. It is all a matter of connections and contingencies or, in other words, luck, by chance. Yet this might have been one of the first films in the abhinetri film genre, ranging in the Bollywood context from Actress (Balwant Bhatt 1934), Kaagaz ke Phool (Guru Dutt 1959), Guddi (Hrishikesh Mukherjee 1971), Hero Hiralal (Ketan Mehta 1988), Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma 1995) to Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (Chandan Arora 2003), to suggest that a career in mass entertainment is possible even after your dreams of becoming a movie star have died. LBC's remarkable closing sequence belongs to Sona, who takes her feckless lover Vikram's words that one chooses one’s successes and failures to heart. Rather than regret that she could not become a film star, she takes pride in the fact that she became a working actress in television soaps, earning a good living. Sona ends up as an independent professional woman in a big city with a growing fandom of her own, a rising star in a career that may even reconcile her one day to her middle-class estranged parents, for they see her each night on their television screens in the provincial town that Sona left behind. In granting to her protagonist Sona a new life in television, Akhtar inaugurates the project of relocating Bollywood; a process that comes to a successful close with her most recent film Gully Boy (2019), a film that, I suggest, captures a new phase in Bollywood's relationship to other circuits of entertainment in contemporary India, pre-eminently popular music.

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ReFocus
The Films of Zoya Akhtar
, pp. 38 - 58
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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