Bombay Velvet begins two years after independence in 1949, in the “city of dreams” that it still is. Fugitives of the horrors of Partition sought refuge in the southern city of Bombay which was far away from the border’s bruises. The refugees sought a living. A living in a ruthless city that shoves dignity out into the very train that brought them to the city. The city of the haves and have-nots. Of the capitalists and communists (and pseudo communists). Of men indulging in extravagance of exclusive posh clubs and men wrestling with life and for a living (in fight clubs). Of corruption, power struggles, bureaucracy, slavery, and everything that our sovereignty promised to free us from.

Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet had been a dream he nurtured for 10 years. A Cannes veteran known for his independent films made on shoe-string budgets, his films possessed the rare quality of looking big. Conceived at a colossal scale, Bombay Velvet starring Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, and re-introducing Karan Johar (after DDLJ, of course), was a film that Kashyap considers as the “biggest loss-making movie” in the history of cinema. Produced by Phantom productions (of which he’s one of the four co-founders), Kashyap in his frenzy of recreating the Bombay of the 1960s admits to having succumbed to the risks associated with the insurmountable production costs involved.

Set in the timeline of 1949-1970, Bombay Velvet was but an uncompromised ode to all the things he ever loved. Cinema and the city that gifted cinema to him, Bombay. The metropolitan Bombay, that was erected on the graveyards of power-mongers and commoners who had to pay the price for its glitter and glamour in the name of “development”.

Immensely inspired from the noir classics of Hollywood, this Bombay noir is the story of Balraj who eventually becomes Johny Balraj probably because his earlier name wasn’t sinister enough. Following the arc of self-destruction that Al Pacino’s Tony Montana attains in Scarface (1983), Johnny Balraj’s journey is one in pursuit of his cinematic dream of being regarded as a “big shot” posthumously.

Based on the novel by Gyan Prakash Mumbai Fables, the titular club Bombay Velvet was the murky marriage of affluence and corruption. It was a title that weighed down on the narrative of the film, so much that it couldn’t justify its titular significance beyond layers of superficiality. Known as the king of spontaneity, Kashyap’s films are celebrated for his very judicious use of dialogues, which are honest to the milieu of the film. The dialogues of his most inorganic film, seamlessly surrender to the test of memory coupled with the ridiculous “apun-wapun” lingo that the actors try to pull. Kashyap’s women characters, however, have always had their own voice, be it the women of Wasseypur, the voiceless Sunaina in Mukkabaaz, or Paro and Chanda in Dev.D. Rosie is but a little different. The voice of Bombay Velvet, she is credited for bringing jazz to Bombay yet hers is a character that gains and loses its voice quite often, almost like the whimsical writing of her character.

Often regarded as a film that lost itself between the shores of commercial and art cinema, it was the music, costumes, lights, and the lavish sets of the film that got buried deeper into anonymity than the film itself. Lyricist Amitabh Bhattacharya’s Urdu verses and Amit Trivedi’s beautiful renditions of the 1960s jazz and his background score (a product of five years of his blood and sweat) also couldn’t save the poorly sketched characters, predictable plot twists, half-baked conflicts, and un-formidable antagonists. The drama could neither evoke a sense of urgency nor mirror the relevance that the songs possessed. Shot by the veteran Rajeev Ravi, his cinematography underlined the dual world Bombay: the world of light and darkness (much like Moothon, 2019), the brightly lit clubs of grandeur coexisting with the dark ominous alleys of crimes. As for the costumes, they were so many (mostly unused) that they decided to rent it out to recover its costs.

In hindsight, Bombay Velvet if not for anything did stay true to the retro era and noir genre it belonged to. With ‘a-better’ a lot of things, this feature could have become the period drama it was conceived to be. It, however, still stands for the unique history of Bombay, one of those few cities, which could still preserve its old bricks in its Mumbai, like the Calcutta in Kolkata and the Dilli in Delhi.