Superboys of Malegaon embodies a curious circularity that connects two real-life phenomena separated by a great deal of time and space. It begins with a grassroots film community in a small Indian town, before roping in grievances from present-day Bollywood, where complaints about fair opportunity and the shortage of relatable, representative stories have been on a gradual crescendo.
In a recent interview, the celebrated indie filmmaker Anurag Kashyap — Bollywood’s definitive iconoclast — had spoken bitterly about the “trial room effect.” He used the phrase to refer to a kind of thinking that seems to pervade Bollywood’s big studio creatives, where that which hasn’t already been portrayed on the big screen cannot be cinema. Kashyap pointed to this phenomenon as a prime reason why Hindi-speaking audiences today seem to feel a growing disconnect with the cinema of their region.
Superboys of Malegaon, based on real-life incidents captured in the similarly titled 2008 documentary, Supermen of Malegaon, is the antithesis of this phenomenon. This theme comes to life not just through the events portrayed, but also in the personal stories of the cast members who bring it to life.
Directed by the illustrious filmmaker Reema Kagti with the freethinking Varun Grover as co-writer, the movie is an underdog party and features the likes of Adarsh Gourav, Vineet Kumar Singh, and Shashank Aurora in a story about a group of friends who decide to start making parodies of famous movies set in their little town of Malegaon. Nasir (Gourav), as Malegaon’s go-to videographer for weddings and formal events, runs a dingy little film hall with his older brother — a failing venture on account of Nasir’s insistence on screening only Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin movies. Meanwhile, the more successful theatre nearby draws crowds with the latest offerings in Bollywood masala.
Amidst these circumstances, Nasir, spurred by a recent break-up, embarks on a quest to make a movie set in Malegaon itself — a movie made by and for Malegaon, exclusively.
The first half of the movie moves forward at a brisk, purposeful pace tracing the group’s rise together as they gain a following for their humorous parodies. Warm, earthy colors adorn the visuals through multiple time jumps, with the period settings recreated with surprising accuracy. Around the halfway mark, the movie suddenly pivots to a character-driven drama, noticeably losing some of its sprightly rhythm.
From a simple film about the rise of a grassroots film movement, the movie delves into what their little venture means in the grander context of art and cinema: the writer versus the producer, the artist versus the sellout.
The top-notch performances of the cast members, along with the film’s life-affirming vitality, bridge the two sides together for the emotional final act. Gourav brings back some of his nuanced drive and aggression from The White Tiger with the same ease he hogs the spotlight.
Meanwhile, the story of Farogh Jaferi (Vineet Kumar Singh), the troupe’s screenwriter, finds an uncanny parallel with the real-life story of the actor himself. One of the many talented, tenacious journeymen of Bollywood, well-known by film buffs for his performances in celebrated words like Gangs of Wasseypur, Singh understands what it means to stand by one’s artistic vision and be rejected for it in favour of more popular and more well-connected options.
These behind-the-stories amplify certain moments in the film with a glowing significance. These moments might even appear somewhat inorganic, but Superboys of Malegaon does a fantastic job of recreating the common vernacular of its setting, and its central cast gels together exceedingly well by the end — interacting in ways that almost seem candid and off-camera.
In between this tone, grand proclamations like, “The writer is the boss!” tear through some tonal fabric. But message received: it’s a single line of dialogue that reverberates the voices of Farogh, the character; Vineet, the actor; and Varun, the film’s screenwriter, a voice known to advocate for better conditions for Bollywood writers.
This dramatic tinge takes on purposeful intent at other points in the film. During the extended casting sequence for the troupe’s first parody, Malegaon ka Sholay, the viewer knows with clarity when a ‘golden moment’ is struck — when a candidate, who may be a friend, or the owner of a local teashop, manages to replicate with force the dramatic inflections of the original Sholay. It’s a signal that strikes clear and true for the film’s Indian audience, for whom these dramatic inflections and dialogue are almost second nature.
The emotional thread that brings the friends together again at the end offers another nod to this overt cinematic fictionality. Superboys of Malegaon doesn’t have joke-ish villains; instead it shows us friends who emote with sincerity, even when in the throes of rage or pride. This shift provides a recreation of a common trope where friends who tried something mad come back together after facing certain discouragement. They regroup with a new intention: to enshrine the spirit of their friendship by following through with the venture they started together.
Kagti communicates a great deal of hope through her characters’ journey. Hope in the power of self-initiation; hope in the possibility of breaking out of one’s given station in life; and hope that we may see ourselves reflected upon the stories we peruse on the big screen. Finally, hope that one’s work may someday get its due.
The film contains a single monologue that rips through layers of grounded tonality to wax poetic about the value of Nasir’s vision. It allowed the people of their small town to feel seen; paraphrasing Farogh’s words, Nasir wrote an entire page in the book of Bollywood history dedicated solely to Malegaon. The first few minutes of the documentary references this value as well — how these remakes set in their own town adopts the local vernacular, endearing these films to their local audience.
Superboys of Malegaon comes full circle in a manner reminiscent of many age-old storytelling structures, except that with this movie, the pattern finds itself recreated in real life and sits on the liminal threshold of real-life stories — the stories of artists who make it their job to reach into that other dimension of fiction.
