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Lost in the Twilight Zone with Amitabh Bachchan
Summary
Cédric Dupire’s ‘The Real Superstar’ spans the actor’s epochal career but is an atypical tribute
Aman in red suede pants and jacket walks down a deserted road at night. Another man in a sky blue jacket over a black shirt races across a bridge as gunfire explodes around him. Yet another, in a deep blue shirt knotted at the waist, staggers out of a warehouse and is immediately carried off by a delirious crowd chanting his name.
Any Hindi cinema fan could read these descriptions and tell you they’re all the same man. Most could probably name the films as well—Majboor, Sholay, Deewaar. What would these fans make of a new film in which all these scenes appear in the space of 10 minutes?
Cédric Dupire landed in India and was immediately confronted with Amitabh Bachchan. On posters, cinemas, hoardings, billboards, TV—the same man. “People are looking at him and projecting on his person their dreams and fantasies," Dupire told me over a Skype call. “I started thinking, what is the life of someone whose picture is everywhere?"
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Dupire is a cinematographer and filmmaker based in Paris. His first feature-length documentary, Musafir (2004), was about folk musicians in Rajasthan. A decade ago, he made a short piece on actors and their fans, which got him thinking about Bachchan and the “fascination he generates in the real world". He started gathering clips from films across six decades—Bachchan walking, running, peering suspiciously at mirrors, being tortured, dying, reappearing. These took the form of a feature documentary, The Real Superstar, which is playing at the Mumbai Film Festival (19-24 October).
Dupire’s film is anything but a straightforward tribute, though. He writes in a note on the festival website: “I decided to portray the point of view of a superstar who gradually loses control of his own identity. Like Truman Burbank in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, the hero is trapped in a world where the boundary between reality and fiction, the plausible and the implausible, no longer makes sense."
The Real Superstar has no voiceover, no onscreen text identifying the source of hundreds of clips. The scenes are aggregated and arranged in the crude outline of a fairy tale: birth, fame, crisis, death, rebirth. If you can imagine every role played by Bachchan as a single character, then this is the story of that character. “I tried to build a narration with all these extracts," Dupire said. “There are so many scenes of Bachchan I would have liked to include, but I only chose ones that served the film." Perhaps this is why Bachchan’s less frequent but virtuoso comic turns are mostly absent here. This would also explain why some of the titles included are minor cuts or just plain bad (no conventional retrospective would include Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap).
Together with editor Charlotte Tourrès, Dupire creates deft, propulsive montages, with Bachchan as different characters performing the same action (a minute-long “running" sequence takes in scenes from eight films). Because Dupire isn’t making a conventional tribute documentary, the juxtapositions are often strange and fascinating. To go from the masked hero of Ajooba—peak declining Bachchan silliness—to the smiling young singer from 1973’s Abhimaan is to jump across entire eras in Hindi cinema in a split second.
Dupire was curious to know how someone familiar with Bachchan’s work might experience the film (it hasn’t yet played for an Indian audience). I told him that though I saw and understood the intent, it was difficult for me to divorce the scenes from their original context. I found the film fascinating in how it reveals the various patterns and tropes that underlie the Bachchan persona and Hindi cinema in general. Scenes play out, then repeat with tiny variations, Bachchan the only constant. This repetition, the feeling of being stuck in a world doubling in on itself, feeds into Dupire’s Twilight Zone-like narrative.
While there are documentaries that are wholly composed of clips from other films, The Real Superstar is unusual in using these to tell its own story and not to talk about cinema or someone’s career (or, in the case of the brilliant Los Angeles Plays Itself, a city). The Green Fog, a 2017 film by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson that uses old TV and movie footage to loosely retell Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, is in the same ballpark. Dupire hadn’t seen it, but said he was inspired by works by experimental artists Ben Rivers and Martin Arnold, and by Christian Marclay’s Crossfire, a four-channel installation with scenes of gunfire compiled from Hollywood movies.
The only non-fiction footage used in The Real Superstar is of the time when Bachchan was hospitalised after a life-threatening accident on the set of Coolie. The outpouring of grief and eventual relief struck Dupire as having the same emotional tenor as the actor’s commercial films. I don’t think The Real Superstar is entirely able to take the viewer into the mind of Bachchan or investigate his persona in a radical way. What it does do very well is shine a light on the building blocks of popular Hindi film, and capture the epic sweep of a life lived onscreen.
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