Films That Love Film: From 'Luck By Chance' to 'Superboys of Malegaon'

“Movies about movies” remain one of the most beloved genres of storytelling across languages and cultures. From François Truffaut’s Day for Night and Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood and Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead, there’s never a dull moment when passionate directors turn the camera onto the excesses, exhilaration and madness of being filmmakers.

These movies often come from a self-reflexive and lived-in space, but not all of them are about filmmaking. Some reveal filmmaking as an inspiration, and instead stem from a life full of cinephilia, escapism and geeky fondness for films. Here are five of the most diverse Hindi movies about movies.

We usually turn to films to escape life. To watch a Vasan Bala movie, though, is to be reminded of why escapism is worth loving. It is to be invited into a life shaped by cinephilia, affection for storytelling, and respect for the symbiotic relationship between mainstream cinema and life. Mard ko Dard Nahi Hota, his first-released feature, oozes all of the above and more. The wacky story of a martial-arts enthusiast who cannot feel pain merges Bala’s own obsession with hyperstylised ’80s Hong Kong action flicks with a middle-class Mumbai upbringing. The spirit of the young hero (Abhimanyu Dassani) and heroine (Radhika Madan) aside, it is marked by a wonderfully campy double role by Gulshan Devaiah.

Given that the immensely enjoyable Om Shanti Om released less than a year before Zoya Akhtar’s debut feature, it would’ve been simple to expect another spoofy, meta-funny and star-driven blockbuster from an industry insider with all the access. But Akhtar’s film delves into the soul of the Mumbai film industry like no other; it’s more interested in the people and dreams and aspirations of an outwardly glamorous profession than the actual scale of it.

To this day it remains one of the most empathetic, intuitive and well-observed Bollywood films about Bollywood (with Shah Rukh Khan’s best cameo yet) — cinema drenched in the nuts and bolts of storytelling.

It’s poetic that a Shah Rukh Khan-produced film stars journeyman Sanjay Mishra as a washed-up side-actor from the golden years who decides to come out of retirement for his 500th role. Hardik Mehta’s Kaamyaab is a poignant ode to the background characters and lives of the silver screen; it shows an inquisitiveness about people whose relevance and self-worth are attached to the anatomy of cinema itself. Mishra has been around for decades, but it wasn’t until the breakout success of Ankhon Dekhi (2013) that his talent began to be taken seriously. You can sense all that hunger and lost time and difficult grace channelled in his role as Sudheer, an old-schooler who returns to a changed landscape of dreams and disappointments.

The line between fiction and reality has never been as delightfully blurred or as sardonic as in Rajat Kapoor’s ingenious little movie. The story revolves around the chaotic making of a period film: one of its characters goes rogue, escapes the screen and wreaks havoc in the real world, while the director falls for the heroine. Kapoor has sustained his own ecosystem of high-concept almost-indies (with overlapping collaborators) for years now, and this whimsical story seems to be drawn from his long-term identity, reflections and conflicts as an independent producer and director.

The tragicomedy doesn’t lose itself in its gimmick; the film works as a wicked satire on the fraught negotiations between art and commerce in modern filmmaking.

Inspired by Faiza Khan’s documentary about a group of small-town ‘amateur’ filmmakers whose local remakes of popular Bollywood hits spawned its own cult following, Superboys of Malegaon is mainstream Hindi cinema’s most recent and expressive story about the cultural impact of storytelling. Set in an India on the margins featuring a community on the brink of erasure, the entertaining film taps into the anxieties and hopes of a place that finds itself torn between catering to mass tastes and committing to personal authenticity.

It’s well-performed, quietly political, commits to the core of brotherhood and unity, and has one of most heartfelt climaxes in recent memory. The tragic irony of it all is that a Bollywood movie about creators finding a voice didn’t quite set the box office on fire.