Kuch (mazedar) nahin hota hai

Illustration/Uday Mohite

There is one point in The Archies, Zoya Akhtar's made for Netflix film, when you glimpse its possibilities.

It's the song sequence, "O Ruby you are my plum pudding", at a 20th wedding anniversary party. There is such bonhomie, sweetness, maza and togetherness, I won't deny my heart ached with a sense of loss. It reminded me of parties my parents had at Air Force stations, whose stone buildings, strict librarians and rosette icing trifle puddings were suffused with colonial pasts. A double memory of fun backlit the faces that filled my television 90s - Kamal Sidhu, Luke Kenny, Tara Sharma, Koel Purie. This is one of the few times the film felt Indian to me. It felt like a 2023 version of Ae meri zohra jabeen (Waqt) or My heart is beating (Julie) - songs that provided a similar fantasy of mischief and warmth in older movies.

But such saturated moments are rare in The Archies. Instead it deals with its inexplicability - why make this even as a high-end showreel for star kids? - with explanation. The laboured historical origin story for the Anglo-Indian town of Riverdale merely uses the Anglo-Indian community to justify The Archies. This is an instrumental, affected realism, without affection and enjoyment of a world. Why not just make a great teen movie about an Anglo-Indian town or any Blytonesque past, full of old and new pleasures as did Love in Simla, Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikandar, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai? That requires vulnerability. The inevitable sweetness of youth is used to simulate this, but is absent in the construction of the work.

Briefly, in the the song Va Va Voom - a confection of skirts, photo studio backdrops and cool dance moves of yore - you slip into unthinking enjoyment. But the film does not trust such pleasures and fun. Its (sincere) moral exhortations about saving trees and communities would work well if they were backed by our own love for this world the kids want to save. Instead of world building we get production design, impressively detailed, but never luxuriated in. We do not drool over shakes and burgers, leave alone ball curry, vindaloo or scrambled eggs. Despite the intensive detailing, the experience feels sparse. Joy exists in superfluous things - goofy bits, crazy clothes, funny phrases, lingering kisses. But here, the script with its linguistically barren Google translate dialogue keeps chivvying us along like a prim matron.
It's almost puritanical, the sensual distance we keep from it all. There is neither recreation (pun intended), nor fantasy. Only design.

I found it poignant that the child superstar Junior Mehmood died the day The Archies released (you know me). His is a once-typical Bollywood tale of fame fading to oblivion, poverty and hardship. That's way of the world of course. Yet what does it mean to produce this extra faux nostalgia, which sweeps like a new flyover across entire other pasts?

Corporatised Bollywood seeks to insure itself against unpredictability, to automate the future in a sense. Content creation, as it's called, is not a land of risky adventures but a safe space for guaranteed multiplication; arranged marriages not chance encounters. Politics is correct, never animated or surprising. That is why everyone needs a reference for an idea, for a look, for a feeling or a thought.

It is in our insistence for something else that we hold on to hope.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com