Bombay Talkies

Four short films. Karan Johar's is about a marriage and a concealed sexuality; Dibakar Banerjee's about an unemployed man who gets a day's work as an extra; Zoya Akhtar's about a boy who wants to dance and a father who will not allow it; Anurag Kashyap's about a man carrying to Bombay a jar of jam his father wants Amitabh Bachchan to eat. The production was made for the centenary of Indian cinema, each director shooting independently. What holds it together is not subject but relation: all four are about what cinema does inside people's lives. Belief in a star in Kashyap's piece, admiration of a dancer in Akhtar's, work as an extra in Banerjee's, old songs in Johar's. Zoya Akhtar's section became the most discussed. A boy wanting to dance and a father objecting on grounds of gender was not something mainstream Indian cinema was addressing directly at the time. It screened at Cannes in 2013 and stood at the centre of the centenary celebrations in India. At the end there is a musical number the four assembled together, with well known figures from Indian cinema appearing side by side. Who it is for: viewers who like Indian cinema and short film anthologies. Who it is not for: the quality varies sharply and two of the pieces are far behind the others, and there is no coherence across them.