Movie: Shamitabh (U/A)
Duration: 154 min
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Dhanush, Akshara Hassan
Director: R. Balki
Rating: 2 Stars
There must be moments in every actor’s life when they’ve asked themselves, “Who am I without my voice?” Apart from Kangana Ranaut, of course. But, seriously, it’s an insecurity all actors grapple with, especially Amitabh Bachchan. Surely he has often wondered what he’d be without his voice. Writer-director R. Balki’s Shamitabh poses this fascinating existential question. It’s profound. And we are excited. But the manner in which he goes about answering it is all fits and starts.
Pardon my bias, but Balki, like most ad men, came up with a superb idea, a great hook, but didn’t have the depth to think it through, to take forward a complicated idea in a complicated way.
All of Balki’s films are injected with some magic realism. Here too, the music that comes on in the opening scene suggests Shamitabh is going to be somewhat fairytale like, somewhat magical. That’s the genius Ilaiyaraaja. His melodious notes are like shining spangles falling on us and the screen.
But, on screen, Balki is simulating excitement — there’s a corny red carpet premier of a film that stars a debutant. He has created a crazy buzz — he is the next superstar. The star, Shamitabh (Dhanush), is on stage with his director and they are taking questions from an eager horde of journalists. And then Shamitabh opens his mouth to answer. The voice that comes out is too grand, too stupendous, too familiar to be coming out of that, well, piddly frame. It’s an extraordinary voice in too commonplace a man.
This longest press conference in the history of cinema is a trite narrative device where questions from journalists trigger flashbacks to Shamitabh’s bachpan, to when Shamitabh was Daanish, the boy without a voice. Each question leads to an episodic flashback, all linking back to how this chit of a man acquired The Voice.
We meet a young boy in a village whose ears are being twisted by the school master because when asked who was Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, he wrote Rohini Hattangadi.
Daanish’s obsession with cinema, a Rajini Siresque beginning before arriving in Mumbai where he meets the cupid-like Akshara (Akshara Haasan), an assistant director, is tied up nicely and things sort of make sense. But then the film goes all medico-bogus on us. We are dragged to Helsinki to meet men in white coats who throw jargon and explain how Daanish can get a voice.
Search for a voice begins and, almost immediately, the film stumbles upon The Voice. It’s of an inebriated giant. Amitabh Sinha (Amitabh Bachchan), gruff, grumpy, eccentric but grand, lives in a graveyard and is impervious to the world and people around him. He seems to hold answers to the mysteries of life. And he’s cocky. He has our full attention. Amitabh can’t believe what Daanish and Akshara are suggesting. He is being asked to lend his voice to this pipsqueak. This audio, that video? The film and Amitabh Sinha scream as much. What a brilliant idea!
Wrapped in this superbly philosophical idea are a gazillion possibilities about where the story can go from here. With an ear piece and an ear capsule, Balki demands total suspension of disbelief. And we go along because he has set up a mind game that’s so supremely noir. But a philosophy quest is first turned into a medical marvel, and though later there are a few moments when we see the ego rising, sense something sublime, sinister, the story that should have been about internal conflict, a crises of identity goes all silly and superficial.
Balki’s direction is excruciatingly flatulent. First a lot of time is spent in trying to give his conceit scientific credibility. But the more he tells us, the more questions pop up. And then he makes AB verbose. Gets him to say too much, flail about too much. Balki should know, as the film’s last few seconds show, that the less Amitabh Bachchan gives us, the more we connect with him. When the voice goes silent, it’s a deeply affecting moment, a moment the film could have taken a better route to get to if the director had just, well, thought a little deeper, been less blinded by his love for AB and so desperate to please sponsors.
R. Balki and his wife Gauri Shinde seem to be devoted to treating us to movie stars we loved dearly once and now miss. They are into framing nostalgia as today’s special. But his Shamitabh is a terribly distracted film. It’s plot plods, and from a high-minded philosophical question, it jumps to desultory, dreary scenes.
Though Shamitabh has some moments, even a Rekha with sindoor bhari maang going weak in the knees and swooning at His Voice, all end up as missed opportunities.
And, worse, Balki commits the crime that many lesser directors haven’t. He wastes an AB soliloquy. Embedded in a scene so contrived, the voice that the film is built around makes you cringe. Amitabh Bachchan here plays a character who is, as usual, installed in the movie star’s status and power. It knows we are putty in his hands, happy prisoners of the voice. He still commands and controls the screen like few others can, and makes any canvas he is a part of grow in size and heft.
And sure, he’s trying new, different roles, but to all of them he brings the old toolkit — same mannerisms, same hand gestures, familiar hamming. He doesn’t even attempt to surprise us. It’s true. No one can look so royally sexy as Amitabh Bachchan does in a burgundy velvet jacket, but a haute new get-up won’t turn us on anymore. Not after we’ve been intimate with him for 42 years.
Poor Dhanush. To be pitted against the baritone without a voice is a terrible, and terribly challenging role. Yet he tries. But Balki’s written a one-dimensional, dull character. I wonder why. Because, surely, if a man who loses his voice changes, a man who acquires the baritone is bound to change more.
Akshara Haasan of a petite frame and the cutest face ever is adorable. Though Balki gave her character very little, she’s able to hold on her own, very cutely.
