Should You Stream Or Skip Prime Video's Jubilee?

A Hyper-Stylised Origin Story For Independent India, Via Showbiz

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. Here: Jubilee.

Dir: Vikramaditya Motwane

Cast: Prosenjit Chatterjee, Aditi Rao Hydari, Wamiqa Gabbi

Stream on: Amazon Prime Video

BACK IN 2022, Vikramaditya Motwane had taken to Instagram to share a snippet of his family history. The filmmaker revealed that shortly after 1947, his family had produced a film called Andolan. It centered on India’s freedom struggle and did not fare well, terminating any similar endeavours by Motwane Limited. He further acknowledged that the film was his grandfather’s passion project and that many attributed Andolan’s failure to its reiteration of the freedom movement in 1951, a time too close to when it really happened. With his latest work, marking Motwane’s return to longform storytelling after five years, the Sacred Games director pays his own homage to this era. Except, this time, he shifts the vantage point. The result is a stunning visual and sonic achievement imbued with vacuous interiority.

Jubilee is a hyper stylised origin story of an Independent India and its aftermath, articulated through the seedy bylanes of showbiz. It is a clever decision since Hindi films have been a telling metric and reservoir of the country’s political chaos. Spanning across six years, from 1947-1953, the show encapsulates a specific temporal history of nation building when it intersected with the rise of Hindi cinema’s first superstar.

The sprawling epic, written by Atul Sabharwal and created by Motwane and Soumik Sen, is centered on a studio owner and his quest for finding a new face for his film. The time is July 1947 and the man is Srikant Roy (Prosenjit Chatterjee), the egotistical co-owner of Roy Talkies. His wife and actress Sumitra Kumari (Aditi Rao Hydari) enjoys equal partnership in the business. In a tryst of fate, she falls in love with Jamshed Khan (Nandish Singh Sandhu), the man Srikant had chosen for his new film. When we see them for the first time, they are covertly meeting in Lucknow and later, making plans to elope to Karachi. Jamshed has been offered a role in a play there and the actor contemplates choosing theater over films, a decision equally informed with the fact that joining the latter mandated a Muslim to hide their identity and adopt a Hindu one. Things don’t fall into place. Jamshed reaches neither Bombay nor Karachi; his absence opens up the place for Srikant’s trusted aide Binod Das (Aparshakti Khurana) to become the coveted superstar — Madan Kumar.

— ISHITA SENGUPTA

Read The Review

MORE REVIEWS

Thadam Remake Gumraah Has As Many Hits As Misses

WHEN a man is found murdered on a rainy night, civil engineer Arjun Saigal (Aditya Roy Kapur) is the main suspect. Even as the inspector in charge of the case, Shivani Mathur (Mrunal Thakur) is looking for additional evidence of Arjun's culpability, his lookalike, a brash Ronnie (Roy Kapur again) is arrested for assaulting a police officer. The cops are in a tight spot: on the one hand, a senior official, the ACP Dhiren Yadav (Ronit Roy) wants to ensure Arjun's guilt is established at any cost, spurred by some past animosity. On the other, Shivani is building a case against Ronnie, triggered by her own dislike.

— REEMA CHHABDA

Read more
Playing in: Theatres

Babylon: Tinseltown’s Creation Myth Gets A Second Draft

HOLLYWOOD in the 1920s, as distilled to its essence of outrageous excess by Damien Chazelle in Babylon, feels more like a natural extension of Caligula’s Rome. An orgy befitting the end of the world gets the party rolling. We’re talking mountains of cocaine, fountains of gin and champagne, revellers getting piss drunk and pissed on, shitfaced and shat on, naked to half-naked bodies writhing wall-to-wall and gyrating against each other, and a dwarf riding a giant dildo like a pogo stick. The bacchanal lives, breathes and dances to the staggered pulse of heady jazz. Just watching the camera survey the decadence is enough to get a contact high, if not whiplash. We get a sense of a filmmaker intoxicated on the frenetic ecstasy of filmmaking.

— PRAHLAD SRIHARI

Read another review
Stream on: BookMyShow Stream

OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

The one newsletter you need to decide what to watch on any given day. Our editors pick a show, movie, or theme for you from everything that’s streaming on OTT.

Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think is worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over.

In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an hour on this.