Creators: Vikramaditya Motwane, Soumik Sen
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane
Writer: Atul Sabharwal
Cast: Aparshakti Khurana, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Sidhant Gupta, Wamiqa Gabbi, Aditi Rao Hydari, Ram Kapoor, Shweta Basu Prasad
Most modern directors are cinephiles and film historians disguised as storytellers. They’re superfans of both movies and movie industries; students of the method, the madness as well as the myths that bridge the two; scholars of the intersection between facts and fictions. So when they get a chance to tell a story about storytelling itself, you know it’s personal. You sense the film-on-films format is sort of autobiographical, a childhood escape that finds a home. You see the cinema of a time and a time of cinema at once. The frames become a little more symbolic, the shots a little more indulgent, the tone a little more vintage, and the homages a little more playful and provocative. You detect a chaotic kid-in-candy-store energy in everyone from Francois Truffaut to Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese to Steven Spielberg, Farah Khan to Anurag Kashyap. It’s Vikramaditya Motwane’s turn with Jubilee, a sprawling alt-reality drama about the nascent years of the Hindi film industry.
Set against the birth of independent India in the 1940s and 1950s, the 10-episode series marries archival vignettes with composite legends through a narrative cocktail of art, ambition, love, politics, murder and everything (except sex. Go figure) in between. You sense the excitement of Motwane – along with co-creator Soumik Sen and writer Atul Sabharwal – in the many based-on-true-rumours characters. It’s a gold rush for trivia geeks: From Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani to Ashok Kumar and Raj Kapoor, this is spot-the-reference filmmaking at its peak. There’s a Bombay-based studio called Roy Talkies, which becomes a pioneer in playback singing and CinemaScope technology. There’s the studio boss (Prosenjit Chatterjee, as Srikant Roy), a ruthless visionary who puts cinema before family and humanity. There’s his business partner and movie-star wife (Aditi Rao Hydari, as Sumitra Kumari), a woman who falls for the studio’s new lead hero. There’s the loyal lab assistant and future superstar (Aparshakti Khurana, as Binod Das) who is haunted by the ghost of the man whose identity he hijacks. There’s his home-maker wife (Shweta Basu Prasad, as Ratna Das), a woman who misses Binod Das and tolerates the star that he becomes. There’s the idealistic young storyteller (Sidhant Gupta, as Jay Khanna), who goes from post-Partition tragedy to Bombay success story. There’s the scrappy courtesan (Wamiqa Habbi, as Niloufer Qureshi), who loves and charms her way to the top of the newcomer-actress chain. There’s the shady financier (Ram Kapoor, as Shamsher Walia), the Cold War-induced designs on propaganda moviemaking, chain-smoking government stooges that put Mad Men to shame, a blink-and-miss Gangubai Kathiawadi cameo and the Bombay-Velvet-meets-Lootera setting.
You sense the buzz of Motwane – a versatile creator whose career has been a testament to the triumph of there being no such thing as a “Vikramaditya Motwane” movie – in the way his craft treads the thin line between showing and showing off. The pilot episode of Jubilee features a moment in which cinematographer Pratik Shah frames two characters, in parallel phone booths, as if they were images on a spliced film reel. The Roy Talkies gate, shaped like an audio cassette, looks like an ode to the future. The transition from silent films to talkies is rooted in the show’s use of ambient sounds, background music and wordless drama. For instance, an early scene has Srikant Roy confronting Sumitra Kumari on a train. She is planning to leave India, but he intercepts her. Instead of sharp dialogue or action, the scene takes refuge in the unsaid: They stare at one another, punctuated by the sound of the steam engine and the station in the middle of the night.