There's the husband who is dull and lonely (and completely not aroused by his wife) and loves old Hindi songs, and things get complicated when Avinash meets the husband and his gay sensor tingles. Infidelity not usually tackled in Indian films) is sterile. Johar begins first, his film being about Avinash, a lonely gay man estranged from his family who meets a lonely married straight woman whose sex life (with her husband, of course. While Johar and Akhtar share this style of directing that many of the filmmakers who've been brought up in this industry from the start possess, Kashyap and Banerjee inject the flavor of world cinema into commercial Bollywood. This ode is sung by four directors: 1) Karan Johar, known for his epic-length melodramas with names usually beginning with letter 'K', 2) Dibakar Banerjee, a superbly talented director whose works evoke the multiplicities seen in Neorealist films 3) Zoya Akhtar, who has won a couple of awards in India and comes from a family of talented actors, musicians and lyricists and 4) Anurag Kashyap, whose works have been screened at Cannes. Bombay Talkies, named after a prestigious movie studio of the same name which opened in the 30s and has closed down now, is a cinematic ode to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Bollywood. For this alone people should catch Bombay Talkies before it exits theaters with its final salute to Bollywood.
I loved Banerjee's work but I hear many other praising Karan Johar more, but you see what's happening here is that everyone's talking a lot more about the film than they usually would. Four different directors with quite different styles and palettes put up their works for an anthology film and you as an audience member have a lot more to discuss here than just the quality of the film itself: you compare these filmmakers' works and form your own preferences. It's got a limited release and has managed to rake in mediocre box-office collections, but it surely deserves to be recognized for being novel not just for the sake of being novel.
I don't mean by saying all this that you should skip the other segments and only catch Banerjee's Bombay Talkies is a far better offering than most other Indian movies you might catch in theaters. And Johar's hokey gay-themed segment seems flaccid in comparison. But poor Zoya Akhtar's segment Sheila Ki Jawaani isn't very lucky, barely holding up to the standards of Banerjee's work. His segment is called Star and it comes right after Johar's opening segment Banerjee's work simply blows the other segments out of water, and only Kashyap's Murabba is able to escape uninjured. Everyone talks about Karan Johar's or Anurag Kashyap's involvement and only a few (which includes me) may've gone for Bombay Talkies to watch out for Dibakar Banerjee. He is one of the best new Indian directors I have seen whose films have gotten far less credit than they deserve. You are far more enthusiastic and involved with these people because Banerjee knits together the entire fabric of his creation rather than simply weaving the design he allows his camera to capture the sight, the sound and the essence of his world and you are respond and reciprocate it to it more than you would to works by other directors. Director Dibakar Banerjee is keener in establishing the little world his characters, both major and minor, inhabit.
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