Bombay Velvet ( Not So Velvety .. )

Bombay Velvet follows Balraj (Kapoor) and Rosie’s(Anushka Sharma) stories. She is a nightclub singer and he is a streetfighter turned henchman. Rosie has suffered abuse since she was a little girl and Johnny has survived poverty. He is in a hurry to become a “big shot” and gets picked up by journalist and businessman Kaizad Khambatta (Karan Johar introduced in a yellow jacket). Khambatta sets up a nightclub called Bombay Velvet, where he can entertain clients who need persuasion and where liquor flows despite prohibition. Johnny and his friend Chimman are given the task of running Bombay Velvet.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Mistry (Manish Chowdhary), Khambatta’s childhood friend, current friend and editor of “Glitz”, makes Rosie his mistress. He then sends her to Bombay Velvet to do some digging about Khambatta. She’s supposed to seduce Johnny for information and she does, only to fall in love with him in earnest. And so begins a love story full of betrayals and danger. (That Mistry conveniently disappears later in the plot is another matter).

Consider the elements that Bombay Velvet has been trumpeting (pun intended). It’s supposed to be an epic love story mounted on a grand, lavish scale set in the Bombay of ’50s and ’60s. The sensational promise of jazz, cabaret, nightclubs; a distressed, heavily made up singer with heavy gowns and big red flower bows in coiffured hair; a perpetually beaten up boxer, madly in love with her; a sly Shylock. The big appeal is the backdrop — the city’s post-independence history of mill strikes, rooted in a non-fiction book, Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash.

Sadly, the backdrop is also the biggest sham about the film. Bombay Velvet pretends to show a real Bombay, but is actually as pretty and artificial as a Sanjay Leela Bhansali set, only in lovely sepia tones. Real facts are just touched upon and relegated to a few lines at the end of the film. The song “Sylvia” nods at the infamous Nanavati scandal, but the film doesn't talk about it. 

Ranbir Kapoor gives the pivotal role all he has. He does have a great deal, and is able to invest Johnny Balraj with the moral ambiguities that come with the territory he inhabits.

Anushka, the femme fatale who ends up playing into the hands of the men she ensnares, serves as the ideal foil. 

But of Karan Johar as the master manipulator who gives the protagonist a hard time, the less said the better. Acting isn't his cup of tea or should I say Coffee. 

One final act in the film by an under-utilized Kay Kay Menon, playing a crime branch detective on the trail of Johnny Balraj, sums up his and the audience’s frustration. He flings his hat into the ground. 

What you leave the hall with is a sense of disappointment. Bombay Velvet has neither the softness of velvet nor the sweep of the city it is an ode to. 

Unlike its pugilist protagonist, the film punches well below its weight. 

Ultimately, Bombay Velvet is a thoroughly disappointing and frustrating film.

Cheers !

Jeetendra Mehra AKA The BUNNYMAN