Readers Write In #861: The Son Rises, The Sauce Returns

By Aman Basha

Not reinvention, but an edgier, Gen Z coded throwback to what made Hindi cinema so fun

Amidst the diverse film industries comprising the Indian film fraternity, Bollywood has always been special. Not just in its obviously hegemonic status in pop culture, but also in how exposed, self aware and almost openly fratricidal it can seem. This is the place where a film will hold Amitabh in reverence and sneak in a Rekha reference or two. No film industry has given as much to the gossip mills, and nowhere else are there the oodles of entertainment that spills both when the industry succeeds and bleeds. We, the audience, equally love and hate Bollywood’s sauce.

While the last few years have seen people love to hate the industry, Bollywood not only dwindled in content but also in sauce factor. When was the last time we had an interesting episode on Koffee With Karan? It seemed after Ranbir’s marriage, Bollywood lost all its spunk, riddled with nepokids hampered either by political correctness or sheer dullness.

As one nepokid after another came into public view from being just a concept and bit the dust, who would have thought that the crown prince of Bollywood nepodom would bring back the much missed sauce, that too through a Netflix series? I am still surprised writing this as I was through the entirety of Bads of Bollywood, that despite its weaknesses and red flags, comes across as a distinct, singular, entertaining voice of a filmmaker whose sensibility can at best be described as the baby of Anurag Kashyap and Farah Khan.

Despite their obsessive love for Hindi cinema, Kashyap’s post modern deconstruction (the cinema-chutiya scene of GOW) and Farah’s spoofy celebration (the OSO awards sequence) are worlds apart, not to mention that the accomplished filmmakers have also struggled in handling the emotional weight of the narrative between the movie references. Aryan Khan, a debutant armed with an armada of cash and contacts, tries to do a fusion of both, leaving the show with enormous swings in tone that can come across as hard to digest and at times, like a booze driven joke session gone too long, often held together by the pervading influence of the man admired by Kashyap and Farah in equal measure.

The relationship between Aryan the director and his superstar father is perhaps unparalleled in Indian film history except Raj Kapoor, whose Awaara plot gets a post modern spin here with the plot twist being a rumor straight out of a Raj Kapoor film set. Unlike Raj Kapoor who used his father only once in his filmography, the directorial voice and dialoguebaazi of Aryan Khan bears strong traces of Shah Rukh Khan’s persona, making the show come across as one of the many entertaining interviews Khan Sr. has given over the years, bristling with confidence, candor, humor, self depreciation, wit, self referencing and showmanship. 

These traits give us a show that loosely forms a plot from the events in the life of the Delhi boy whose mansion became Mumbai’s third most visited tourist spot, while mocking the very same man as “Ghante Ka Baadshah”.

Beyond the jokes and meta references, there is some clean writing with minor elements like a strange phone, a broken fence and icloud storage finding greater relevance to the plot progression. Most of the show is carried on the shoulders of a talented cast led by an athletic Lakshya Lalwani, repped by an effective Anya Singh and Bobby Deol, who is terrific in his contempt for an asshole son and as a sweet manipulative dad to a exquisite Sahher Bamba, in a welcome break from the monotonous villains he’s been playing on screen. 

Befitting a show that mocks all three Khans and is most reverent to a cameo by the most noughties coded star courtesy Bilal Siddiqui, it is the has-beens and hanger ons of Bollywood who steal the spotlight and reduce the leads to straight foils. This part of Bollywood includes Manoj Pahwa who’s either piss drunk or pissed off to Rajat Bedi who delivers the performance of a lifetime in a part that both stings and is a hoot when it becomes the smartest man in the room, and finally Raghav Juyal in a stand out masaledar act where the drama, comedy and references come together cohesively, resuscitating the show from its scatter shot tone. 

His rendition of a popular noughties song will forever stay in my mind, but the more daunting musical achievement of this show is in resurrecting Duniya Haseeno Ka Mala, a song inferior to Mere Khwabon Mein Tu, but which will now have a completely different context for any viewer. All in all, the Ba****ds of Bollywood is not reinvention, but an edgier, Gen Z coded throwback to what made Hindi cinema so fun.