Superboys of Malegaon
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes
Stars: Adarsh Gourav, Vineet Singh
Writers: Varun Grover, Reema Kagti
Director: Reema Kagti
In theaters and streaming on Prime
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
You can like a movie, you can love a movie — and you can fall headlong into unbridled rapture with not just a movie, but also the characters, the culture, and the sheer humanity of the film’s vision.
It doesn’t happen often. When it does it’s utterly unexpected. And such is the case with me and this modest, funny, triumphant tale of people pursuing their passion and then discovering, much to their surprise, that the world has been waiting to embrace their efforts all along.
For lots of Westerners, the whole idea of films set in India — Slum Dog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel aside — is impenetrable. The teeming streets, the kaleidoscope of contrasting colors, the tightly wound strands of religion and social norms seem like a lot to get past before you even begin to try and relate to a film’s characters.
But I’m imploring you, find a way to spend some time with this touching tale — based on a true story chronicled in a 2008 documentary — illuminating the persistence of friendship and the universality of film. Most of all, it’s a testament to the truth that there is no cultural divide when it comes to sentimental tears.
It’s 1997, and an ambitious young man named Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) has a problem or two, or three. The claptrap movie theater he co-owns with his brother in the remote town of Malegaon is failing, largely because Nasir insists on screening old Buster Keaton films, rather than the wildly popular Bollywood musicals that are all the rage with audiences. The country’s copyright authorities are on his case because he keeps re-editing Indian action movies into comical mashups. Worst of all, the parents of his girlfriend seem to be on the verge of marrying her off to a guy with considerably better financial prospects.
Forced to pull his popular mashups from his theater screen, Nasir and his best friend, a frustrated screenwriter named Farogh (Vineet Singh), hit upon an unlikely Plan B: They will use Nasir’s second-hand video camera to create parodies of popular films, translating them from the neon-lit streets and sleek neighborhoods of Mumbai to the mud-caked lanes and clapboard houses of their humble home town.
Enlisting all their buddies to costar, the pair launch their first project: a satire on the 1975 Bollywood action drama Sholay. That may not mean much to American audiences, but imagine picking up a phone and trying to replicate Die Hard and you’ll get the idea. I’m reminded of the little-seen 2008 Jack Black comedy Be Kind, Rewind, in which he and a buddy (Mos Def) rescue a failing VHS rental shop by re-creating Hollywood’s greatest hits in the alleys and apartments of their urban hometown. Both films capture the primal human instinct to create art, and to interpret even the most specialized works on their own terms.
Of course, the hand-made qualities of the Malegaon version of Sholay are precisely what make it a sensation with the filmmakers’ friends and neighbors. The first week, there’s a line around the block as the entire town clamors to see the movie for the second and third time. Nasir and Farogh could not be happier or more proud: In Malegaon, these two are Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas rolled into one.
For much of the film’s length, the pleasures arise from witnessing the resourceful filmmakers use every meager resource at their disposal to approximate the techniques of India’s movie studios — most notably, attaching their camera to a bicycle seat to achieve smooth dolly shots. Soon, though, schisms begin to appear: While Nasir is content to keep recycling plots from Bollywood classics, Farogh has notebooks full of ambitious original screenplays he’s dying to realize onscreen. A bitter falling-out ensues, and Farogh departs for Mumbai, confident he’ll find an industry anxious to absorb his creativity.
That plan doesn’t quite work out, and neither does Nasir’s confidence that he can thrive on his own. And Nasir hits emotional rock bottom when, working his side gig as a wedding videographer, he is hired to tape the nuptials of his former girlfriend and her rich, successful new husband.
It takes a local tragedy to bring Nasir and Farogh back together: Their longtime friend Shafique (Shashank Arora), a mild-mannered go-fer who they’d always rather thoughtlessly kept at the margins of their filmmaking, is dying. Reluctantly, for their old pal’s sake, the two reunite for one more project: A remake of Superman: The Movie starring a steadily declining Shafique in the title role.
As is my custom writing a review, I’m sitting here watching the trailer for The Superboys of Malegaon, and even now I’m finding it had to keep it together.
There’s a reason why, following the screening I attended at the Toronto International Film Festival, the otherwise movie-saturated audience leaped to its feet and applauded and cheered as if they would never stop. I think it has to do with the way the film plugs into our human desire not just to see art, but to see ourselves in art. And when the art of a culture fails to hold a mirror up to a segment of society, new and uniquely ambitious art forms are going to organically spring from that segment, half to spite the mainstream and half to fill a yawning chasm.
Co-writer/director Reema Kagti, among India’s most celebrated filmmakers, lavishes his love for the cinema and for the people of his country on every frame of Superboys. Each character, from the leads to the least, is infused with personality and passion. As Nasir, Gourav burns with a mix of blind ambition and artistic vision. In the more nuanced role of the principled screenwriter, Singh embodies the crippling frustration of a visionary creator trapped within the strictures of a stratified society.
The real-life moviemakers portrayed in The Superboys of Malegaon didn’t just become hometown heroes: They created an entirely new genre of Indian film that thrives to this day. Further proof that, like hope — and often in tandem with it — art springs eternal.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
