Heroes and “Heroes”: AK VS AK and the blossoming of Meta-Cinema in Bollywood
Anurag Kashyap and Anil Kapoor in AK vs AK (2020).
Vikramaditya Motwane’s AK vs AK asks more questions about reel and real than any other film in recent memory: How much of real life inspires cinema? How far can cinema piggyback on what’s happening in the outside world?
On the heels of the horrific Mumbai blasts in 1993, star Indian actor Sanjay Dutt was arrested at the Bombay airport and hauled off to answer charges under the TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act). Dutt was coming off of a movie whose ironic nomenclature would dog him for the rest of his life: he had starred as Khal Nayak (‘Villain’) earlier that year; and as whispers grew, and cops milled around, speculations surged, and courts and prisons swallowed him whole, he was painted as a ‘khal nayak’ in real life, too.
It was a near-seamless comingling of the real and the reel, fact and fiction, life and its verisimilitude (?). The tag of ‘khal nayak’ followed Dutt around on all his travails in and out of jail, and occasioned far too many unimaginative newspaper headlines in the day.
Why do I think of this? Released recently—and still gracing Netflix’s pat-on-its-own-back Top 10 list—has been the hit AK vs AK (2020), a movie that asks more questions about reel and real than any other in recent memory. The film wonders: how much of real life inspires cinema? It probes: how far can cinema piggyback on what’s happening in the outside world?
If nothing else, AK vs AK is an attempt to draw first blood, pioneering a move towards greater accessibility and striking down our Indian obsession to be star-struck. Are we ready to view the “star” as they are, stripped of their sheen, bereft of the gamut of PR machinery?
At the outset, let it be said that AK vs AK (starring actor Anil Kapoor and director Anurag Kashyap as the two AKs) is not sensational cinema. The wafer-thinness of its plot and the conspicuity of its twist (like me, you’ll probably sense it coming a mile away) do not merit applause. Some parts of the “real lives” of the various actors/characters that bleed into Vikramaditya Motwane’s film feel too over-done. For instance, why does Harshvardhan Kapoor wrestle his father to near-death just to steal a minute alone with Kashyap, so he can extol his virtues? Granted, that self-jibe about how his career needs a resurrection after the 2018 flop Bhavesh Joshi Superhero (directed by Motwane himself) is delicious, but that jibe is diluted when the younger Kapoor took to social media only a day later to clarify the diss, claiming it’s actually the favourite of his films. (He may have done this to stem a certain level of trolling, but the question is: Can you really take even yourself apart in the Hindi film industry without someone else taking you to task for it?)
And what of Anil Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap themselves—and the translation of their real-life selves into cinema? The effect is overdone at best—almost reeking of a deliberate attempt to ensure there is no “bungling of the two”. Almost as though one or both worked in such manipulated hyperboles of their characteristic traits into the script that you’d be far-fetched to mistake the Kapoor/Kashyap on screen for the ones off it. Kapoor is atrociously arrogant on screen, lending credence to the assumption you are near-laughably nudged towards: he must be different off it, or that Kashyap’s churlish bedside manner cannot be a reasonable transliteration of who he is—disingenuousness writ large on both those machinations. Coupled with the lingering suspicion you battle through much of the film that one or both would have wiped off anything that is truly compromising, and you’re left with a very sad prototype of meta-versions of the two actors. Things were made worse when the duo “sparred” on Twitter, seemingly over one another’s poor choice of film, lack of box-office moolah and abundance of body hair (!). It fooled no one, however, and, riding the same anxious-to-prove-hyperbole train, Captain Obvious Sidharth Malhotra quickly added a comment on how it was a “campaign” for Netflix India. Seems we do nothing that isn’t governed by persistent fears of public perception. Yet, if only….
There is a lot that works well for the film. Both the leads are in their top form as actors, as are the various others making cameos, including a suitably-grumpy Boney Kapoor and Anil Kapoor’s real-life employees (a whole gamut of assistants) and hotel managers. Anil must find his ‘real-life’ daughter Sonam Kapoor before sunrise. One of the most thoughtful moments in the film is when Anil stands on a stage in front of a excited mob, asking them to help him; the crowd, however, extract him for its pound of flesh, egging AK to first dance for them, appropriately to his overdone performance from Ram Lakhan’s “My Name Is Lakhan”. You could be mistaken for thinking this as a surreal fall from grace, before being jolted back into the “meta-ness” of things by the deliberate shakiness of the handheld camera.
But what makes AK vs AK particularly special is the fact that phenomenon like this is so thoroughly uncommon in Indian cinema. Despite someone like Harshvardhan Kapoor still feeling the need to circumvent questions by preempting an answer, the film was still made with all those little foibles about an actor that are easy to dislike. In a demigod-hungry society where tinsel stardom equals inaccessibility, surely it couldn’t have been easy to be that dislikeable, that “cringey”, that infuriating—however fictionalised it may be.
Bollywood has rarely braved testing the waters of the meta-cinema bandwagon, unlike films from other parts of the world. There’s the critically-acclaimed Iranian docu-fiction Close-Up which told the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated the (real) filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to dupe a family into thinking they were “starring” in his “film”. Every member of that family played themselves in the film that threw up unparalleled questions about reality and identity. Then, there’s 2003’s Coffee and Cigarettes where several actors (Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, et al) played versions of themselves. 2008’s phenomenal success story Tropic Thunder also continually played with the audience’s proclivity to suspend disbelief, teasing and tantalising one with real vis-à-vis reel tropes of the actors. It didn’t help that large names like Robert Downey Jr, Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise (rumoured to have played a dramatised version of Harvey Weinstein before the latter’s downfall) were still playing people in the movie industry, just that they were the embodiment of Hollywood’s archetypal heroes.
And can one enumerate any list of note without remembering Borat, the docu-fiction with its slew of politico-cultural implications, harking back to a Brechtian time with its insistence on smashing the fourth wall?
Meta-cinema in India has only just reared its head, but it’s been a long way coming. Half-fledged attempts have been made in the past, with Khamosh (1985), film that launched a whole commentary about the Bollywood art of making thrillers, and Fan (2016), which—despite its commercial failure—braved newer terrains of exploring issues of stardom and stalking, of the self-assurance of fandom, and the fickleness of success. Yet, how much more entertaining would it have been to peer deeper into the folds of the “star” that Shah Rukh Khan played in the movie – if he had played himself, or a movied version of himself? How much more fun to have squinted at the real, raw flesh-and-bone assembly of a huge movie star, comprehending the tantrums (Wankhede et al) and the fears that pervade the potential dissipation of his stardom?
What if female leads followed suit, really lifting the curtain on signing on films in half-frenzied desperation where men with much lesser experience on the screen earned twice as much and gave thrice their many interviews? How real would that bevy of frustration seem, on par with women in their late twenties, thirties, forties…working for pittances compared to male compatriots, parrying in exhaustion the accusations of less work, more pay here—than more work, less pay at home?
So, where does AK vs AK stand in this great battle? If nothing else, it’s attempted to draw first blood, pioneering a move towards greater accessibility and striking down our Indian obsession to be star-struck. Are we ready to view the “star” as they are, stripped of their sheen, bereft of the gamut of PR machinery at constant work to give us who we need to see rather than who we’re deserving of? As a society and a populace, rife with far greater danger of losing our freedoms than we’ve ever been—and in far greater need than we’ve ever been of our aforementioned “heroes” to stop said danger—we deserve to find out.
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Urmi Bhattacheryya is an independent journalist, formerly at The Quint, a feminist and trashy-reality-TV-watcher (like you wouldn't believe) and a reader of reads. If you ask, she'll channel her inner Bipasha Basu and tell you to do bicep curls. So don't ask. You can find her on Twitter: @UBhattacheryya or Instagram: @urmi6.
