Cast: Anil Kapoor, Anurag Kashyap, Harshvardhan Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Yogita Bihani
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane

BLUF

A superstar and an innovative film-maker star in a largely unscripted mockumentary where the brilliant filmmaker kidnaps the movie star’s daughter to film a realistic movie which he plans to shoot on the go as the kidnapping progresses.

THE MEAT AND THE POTATOES

Provocative and satirical, the movie is a meta experiment that is a first for Bollywood. A new genre executed to perfection by Vikramaditya Motwane.

The story mobilizes irony in a mix of parody and satire, touching aspects of nepotism, talent, star power and explores a genre that has not been tried in Bollywood before.

Ak and AK  roast each other over who’s a bigger name and Kashyap ends up plopping water on Kapoor’s face. This leads to Kashyap implementing a plan to kidnap Anil’s daughter Sonam, to get back at Kapoor for humiliating him by rejecting his movie. So Kashyap forces Kapoor to work in his mockumentary as an assistant (Yogita Bihani) shoots the exchange real-time.

IN THE ZONE

So where does AK v AK fit within levels of mockumentary treatment? How does it make use of the mockumentary genre? Is it subversive? New? Edgy? In its take-up of the mockumentary, how does this production position its audience and its subjects in relation to one another and in relation to the documentary form? Ak v Ak is both pleasurable and problematic—new yet familiar. The film’s use of irony has been recognized as and conflated with critique, but an examination of the script by Avinash Sampath suggests the need for the disentanglement of this association, and at the very least, a recognition that irony, critique, and subversion are not one and the same. All in all, this film raises some questions about the goals and deployment of irony, the implicit hierarchical ranking of humor, and the positioning of who gets to be “in” on the joke and who is left outside on the margins.

What it presents is the authentic lives of the two warring celebrities while the woman shooting the scenes is chasing their lives with the camera.

FWAR

Motwane in his direction crushes all the rules of directing a movie. The audience is not required to decode the film’s use of documentary conventions or invited to skeptically test the film’s factuality; rather, the audience is placed in a privileged position of knowing. They are rewarded for our cultural knowledge of what the mockumentary sets out to do even if we have not had to exert ourselves to detect where the line between fact and fiction has been drawn. Of course, these characters are extreme, larger-than-life, and satirical, we smugly say to ourselves.

A scene in which Yogita is asked to put the camera down still captures Anil from the mirror or manages the footage of Anil Kapoor’s shaking hands under the table is testimony to careful instances of impactful direction.

Alokananda‘s background creates maximum impact in its minimalism. Two songs ‘Duniya Badi Gol’ &, ‘Ghum’ are situational in the most idiosyncratic way possible. They are both peppy and totally “jhakkas”.

WHAT WE LOVED

The entire experiment. Quirky, crazy, and totally out of the park

WHAT WE MISSED

Nada. Nada