It’s a madness that has gripped many a film lover: What if I made my own movies? And so it is with Nasir Shaikh (Adarsh Gourav), a young man in the middle-of-nowhere industrial city of Malegaon, India, who helps his brother run their struggling “video parlor,” a sort of small cinema projecting VHSes of old movies. Nasir loves Keaton and Chaplin; their local audience, not so much. So Nasir gets it in his head to organize his friends to make “parodies” of Bollywood classics with a local spin, using local amateur cast and crew. They start with their own take on 1975’s Sholay… and it’s a hit. Locally, at least.
Superboys of Malegaon follows Nasir and his for-the-love-of-film exploits from 1997 through 2010, blending gentle, charming comedy as Nasir fumbles his way through learning how to actually produce and direct a movie — his use of a bicycle as a camera dolly is inspired — with the interpersonal drama that springs up from the inevitable rifts among his gang of pals, spawned by changing fortunes and diverging motivations over the years. Director Reema Kagti and screenwriter Varun Grover stumble a bit with this aspect of Superboys — it gets mired in the mushy middle — but the breakdown of one particular friendship does highlight the disparity, even for movie lovers, between Bollywood fantasy and their workaday world that drives Nasir’s modest success. His writer, Farogh (Vineet Singh), longs for a serious cinema career and decamps to the glamour of Mumbai, home of the Bollywood industry, but he battles to be heard there, especially because he wants to tell stories about the ordinary lives of ordinary people like himself and everyone at home. There’s simply no taste for that in the all-singing, all-dancing dream factory.
But back in Malegaon, the “nobodies” making movies for other “nobodies” are celebrated, and the giddy glee all around is infectious, particularly as Nasir’s body of work reaches its zenith with his “parody” of Superman, starring his most loyal friend Shafique (Shashank Arora, an especial standout here as a sweet doofus). Kagti and Grover and the delightful cast — working from the deeply poignant true story first told in Faiza Ahmad Khan’s 2012 documentary Supermen of Malegaon — find pure joy in the bringing of joy to an audience… both the ones onscreen and the one we ourselves are watching from. This is a winsome portrait of geeky passion, enduring friendship, and the power of fun, engaging storytelling to make life a little more worth living.
more films like this:
• Supermen of Malegaon [Prime US]
• American Movie [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US]