If Luck By Chance and Om Shanti Om had a foul-mouthed lovechild—that child would be Aryan Khan’s The Ba**ds of Bollywood, produced by his father, Shah Rukh Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment.
It's an auspicious directorial debut for Khan: a rollicking ride through the nether regions of Bollywood—and I mean nether regions! And if you’re wondering about those asterisks—there is an explanation, although it’s a bit of a cheat.
Scene-Stealers Everywhere
A charismatic Lakshya plays Aasmaan Singh, an outsider who has just made his film acting debut. What he should do next is the big question. He is being wooed by his producer, Freddy Sodawallah (a scenery-chewing Manish Chaudhari), but other producers are keen too—like Karan Johar—who plays himself and mischievously exaggerates every KJo stereotype.
Like both Luck By Chance and Om Shanti Om, The Ba***ds of Bollywood is stuffed with cameos—but instead of just showing up and looking pretty, they all gleefully send themselves up.
It’s astonishing, actually, how masterfully Khan has managed to corral his entire cast: every last actor is perfectly tuned into the whacky frequency of the series.
The leads are Lakshya and a very confident Sahher Bambba—who plays debutante nepo baby Karishma Talvar—but they are almost overshadowed by the actors around them.
Raghav Juyal, as Parvaiz, does wonders with the stock best-friend role, almost making us forget the character has no life outside of Aasmaan. Manoj Pahwa, as Aasmaan’s uncle Avtar, goes deliciously over the top: if you thought he was hammy in Jigra, watch how he rips into the swear words here like they’re a particularly juicy piece of meat.
Anya Singh, impressive in Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, makes a strong impression as Aasmaan’s manager Sanya. Rajat Bedi as failed (but rallying) actor Jaraj Saxena, Divik Sharma as Karishma’s snarky brother Shaumik and the always-reliable Mona Singh as Aasmaan’s loving mother—I will remember these performances.
And towering above them all is the glorious Bobby Deol—as superstar Ajay Talvar, he is magnetic every time he is onscreen.
It’s Sinfully Camp
The actors dial up their performances, while Khan and composer Shashwat Sachdev align the musical cues just so, and everything moves along at a crackling pitch.
Make no mistake: there’s nothing subtle about The Ba**ds of Bollywood—right down to the out-of-nowhere final-episode twist—but that’s partly what makes it so enjoyable. It’s sinfully camp.
Even the production design is in on the joke: at one point, Karishma has a breakdown next to a lamp shaped like a man facepalming.
Karishma and Aasmaan come together after they argue at a Rajeev Masand-style newcomers’ roundtable. Karan Johar identifies their latent chemistry and decides to cast them together. We are primed for an enemies-to-lovers pipeline.
The problem, however, is that this central love story is never fully convincing. Bambba and Lakshya share chemistry for sure, but Khan—who has co-written the series with Bilal Siddiqi and Manav Chauhan—does not give us many scenes of them actually in love.
The romantic development is quite awkwardly arrived at, which is strange, considering the sheer amount of screen time the makers had to play with.
It gets more wobbly in the later episodes, as the writers appear to run out of story, relying heavily instead on extended action set pieces. Still, these set pieces sizzle with energy—and superb support from editor Nitin Baid and cinematographer Jay Pinak Oza.
Episode six, for instance, is fairly aimless in terms of plot, but a couple’s clandestine escape from a locked room is cut against a horny Shaumik’s masturbatory rhythms: it’s wild.
Bollywood Gets Gleefully Roasted
There are hilarious touches. Emraan Hashmi shows up as—wait for it—an intimacy co-ordinator. The underworld kingpin Gafoor (Arshad Warsi) runs his empire from an underground den hidden behind a fridge door.
Karan Johar declares, ‘Don’t fuck with the movie mafia’, a term notoriously applied to him by Kangana Ranaut.
And in an action scene in Aasmaan's debut film, he catches a bullet fired at him in his mouth! Nothing is taken seriously, and everyone—from Badshah to Shah Rukh Khan—gets their share of mockery. (This may be the first project in which all three Khans have screen credits—although they sadly do not share screen space.)
Not Just Fun and Games
Of course, it can’t all be fun and games and by episode three we are given the inevitable heartfelt speech about the struggles of nepo kids.
It punctures the irreverence a bit, and not in a good way. But then Khan is not here simply to give us a good time—he wants to tell his story with all the masala bells and whistles.
Which means in addition to good-looking stars, action, romance, and swearing, we also hark back to older Hindi film tropes: the mother figure (Mona Singh), the funeral scene, religious syncretism (the Muslim Parvaiz wears his skull cap as he lights a Hindu pyre), and even a homoerotic schism between male best friends. It’s all here—mostly quite successfully.
Still, we always return to the fast-turning wheels of the unbridled plot.
The Ba***ds of Bollywod is outrageous—and outrageously entertaining. It may not have many genuine insights on Bollywood (for that, Luck By Chance remains the ur-text)—indeed, the film industry is nearly forgotten in the last two episodes—but I haven’t had such a good time watching a Netflix show in a while.
(Sahir Avik D'souza is a writer based in Mumbai. His work has been published by Film Companion, TimeOut, The Indian Express and EPW. He is an editorial assistant at Marg magazine.)