There’s Lots to Admire in ‘Jubilee’ But There’s Little to Love

Jubilee

Cast: Prasenjit Chatterjee, Wamiqa Gabbi, Aparshakti Khurana, Sidhant Gupta, Nandish Singh Sandhu, Shweta Basu Prasad, Aditi Rao Hydari, Ram Kapoor, Arun Govil

Direction: Vikramaditya Motwane

Rating: ***1/2

Streaming on Amazon Prime

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Jubilee, set in the stylish film world of Bombay in the late Forties and Fifties, is bathed in all sorts of nostalgic glow and glory. 

Over 10 episodes — each named after a hit film of that time — Jubilee meticulously creates a glamorous, vintage world lit by halogen bulbs to tell a story that’s one part real, several parts fiction. 

Based on a script that Motwane has written with Soumik Sen and Atul Sabharwal, Jubilee’s main story is based on the life of Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani Chaudhury, the first couple of Hindi cinema who together set up Bombay Talkies in 1934. Though they later became estranged, Rai and Rani continued to work together and their studio launched the career of Ashok Kumar, and later Dilip Kumar. Rani, herself a reigning star and India’s first diva, acted in several Bombay Talkies films, most of them super hits.  

Jubilee uses Rai and Rani to tell a larger story about films, passion and politics. 

The series — whose each episode opens with black-and-white credits that roll in English, Urdu and Hindi, in fonts that we haven’t seen since our screens went technicolor — is about men and women driven by love, lust, ego, fame and greed, and about hits, superstars and flops. It is about directors devoted to films and political forces trying to use films to control people’s hearts and minds.

Jubilee is prestige TV mounted on a grand scale. The show’s politics is clear-eyed and sharp, and the series has some exceptional performances, including the joyous discovery of Sidhant Gupta, but for about four episodes in the middle, I struggled to stay with it or care about its characters. 

That’s because its ambition is skewed, leaning more towards creating seductive beauty with an alienating obsessiveness.

Like the brilliant Rocket Boys, Jubilee is rich with period detail, its characters have lots of airs and a lot happens to them, but they remain flat, lacking in humanity. 

While Rocket Boys used the past as a historical and political setting to bring alive great characters and the things they did and the institutions they created, Jubilee constantly fetishizes the time it is set in and the inanimate things that made up that past.  

There’s a hold-your-breath reverence with which sets are created, scenes are composed and characters are shot in Jubilee, at once elevating and reducing them to stunning vintage exhibits that must be observed from a “do-not-disturb” distance.

Since he made Udaan in 2010, Motwane has held a lot of promise. But none of his films or series since (Lootera, Bhavesh Joshi Superhero, AK vs AK and Sacred Games) have lived up to that promise.

He takes risks and always seems to be trying something new, but there’s a heaviness in his writing and direction. Most of his work (except Udaan) has a brooding-in-sepia look and tone that remains superficial because it never gets articulated in his story or characters. 

Jubilee is an important series. It’s about a country whose birth was marked by bloodshed, displacement and rage, and it comes at a time when that country is taking rebirth, again in the midst of riots, rage and turmoil. 

It’s a series that harks back to the past to make sense of the present. I just wish it did that with a little more messy humanity, and a little less care for that wood-paneled office and that glistening brooch on that gorgeous saree.

Set in undivided India in mid-1940s, at a time when the country was on the cusp of Partition and Independence, Jubilee opens in what was then called Bombay. 

The film, Nal Damyanti, is running in theaters and is a huge hit. Partition has been announced and Roy Talkies, the foremost film studio led by the husband-wife team of Srikant Roy (Prasenjit Chatterjee) and Sumitra Kumari (Aditi Rao Hydari), is waiting to launch the next superstar, Jamshed Khan (Nandish Singh Sandhu) as Madan Kumar.

But both Sumitra and Khan are missing.  

Desperate, Roy tasks his employee and confidant Binod Das (Aparshakti Khurana) to go to Lucknow and bring them back to Bombay. 

Meanwhile, a young and handsome Jay Khanna (Sidhant Gupta), also arrives in Lucknow to get Khan to commit to joining his father’s theater group in Karachi. En route to his return to Karachi, Jay meets Nilofer (Wamiqa Gabbi) in brothel No. 56 while she is performing a sub-par mujra to a lovely song.

Nehru delivers his “At the stroke of midnight hour” speech, riots break out and a Muslim man is attacked. Lives, families and destinies are thrown asunder and everyone is desperate to get to a safe place. 

Nilofer finds herself locked up in a brothel on Bombay’s Grant Road. Jay along with his father (played by Arun Govil) and family arrives in a refugee camp and Roy babu finds his Madan Kumar in the unlikeliest of men.

Intertwined with this is the story of Srikant Roy’s fierce devotion to films, Sumitra’s desperation to find Jamshed, the rise of Madan Kumar, the birth of another superstar, changes in technology, use of pre-recorded songs, filmy rivalries and feuds, political and foreign interference, pressure to make propaganda films and the sarkar banning “vulgar and westernized” film songs on All India Radio, thus creating Radio Ceylon’s most iconic show, Binaca Geetmala. 

Years go by, fortunes change, but K. Asif is still shooting Mughal-e-Azam.

As guilt and ghosts of the past hover, in a scene that I think is the series’ crux, Srikant Roy grabs a film roll and says to Binod Das, “Badalte waqt aur badalti taqat ke samne jhukne mein koi power nahin.” 

Motwane had the generous, luxurious expanse of 10 episodes to create a series whose story and characters are as stunning as its sets. He doesn’t do that, but he does other things quite well.

Jubilee has all the ingredients of the films of the Fifties. 

There’s the studio head controlling the world from his posh office while the hero is desperately looking for a naukri. There’s the hurting woman looking for the truth about her lover, and a malevolent man who hides a dark secret. There’s also a hole in the hero’s shoe, a helpful mochi (cobbler), a love triangle, a murder, a court scene, a night club, a sexy crooner, Babuji ki pagri and an innocent girl left cradling unrequited love with a smile and seva bhaav.

Apart from Srikant Roy and Sumitra Kumari, who are based on real-life characters, the rest of the characters in Jubilee are aggregations of people around them. 

Binod Das and Jay Khanna are a mix of Ashok Kumar and Sashadhar Mukherjee (producer who worked with Bombay Talkies and was Ashok Kumar’s brother-in-law), but Jay also has some strains of director Amiya Chakravorty and Dilip Kumar, and Nilofer carries notes of Madhubala.

Though Jubilee draws a lot from the lives of these people and real events, it is not telling the story of Rai and Rani. The series, in fact, opens after Himanshu Rai died (in 1940, at the age of 48), and doesn’t follow Rani who continued to run the studio after Rai’s death.

Motwane’s politics lie In the choices he makes, his deviations and additions. 

Though in real life, Rani eloped to Kolkata, in Jubilee, she goes to Lucknow where we hear of Charbagh station and visit Awadh theatre. There’s one murder in the series, and it’s of a Muslim man in Lucknow.

In these and many other ways, Jubilee commemorates our past and Motwane seems to be telling us one simple thing: Woh bhi ek daur tha, yeh bhi ek daur hai. Woh daur guzar gaya, yeh daur bhi guzar jayega.

Motwane also gives his actors a vast expanse to show their chops.

Prasenjit’s performance as the dapper and egoistic Roy babu is the main pole on which the large tent of Jubilee is pitched.

A man driven by his passion for films as he struggles to keep his cinema independent, Prasenjit grounds the show in his Roy Talkies studio while sipping whiskey and smoking cigars.

Sidhant Gupta breaks into this tent with a joyous jive and in every scene announces the arrival of an actor who has the makings of a star.

Shweta Basu Prasad and Arun Govil carry with them a piece of our simple, decent past and give the series that one thing it lacks the most — humanity. 

The biggest disappointments for me were Aparshakti Khurana and Aditi Rao Hydari. Both irritate and drag down the show in their unique ways. 

On paper, Binod Das’ character is a meaty one. He does a lot and a lot happens to him. But Khurana plays Binod Das with a sulk and a pal of gloom that doesn’t lift, but gets worse. 

Aditi Rao Hydari is beautiful, but I think Motwane has done a great disservice to Devika Rani by casting her because she doesn’t act, she just poses and pouts. Hydari is like a still-life portrait of simmering emotions — her eyes are always brimming with tears, her lips are always quivering and she always seems to be on the verge of a breakdown. 

We’ve seen this portrait hanging in other films, and it’s damn boring.