Avant-garde auteur, Spike Jonze, the man who directed arguably the greatest two meta films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, immediately came to mind as I was watching the trailer to Netflix’s AK vs AK. The reason being is that like those films, AK vs AK takes famous cinema personalities and inserts them in a film that straddles the fine line between non-fiction and absurdist fantasy.
At the start of the film, we see Anurag Kashyap, resentful of Bollywood royalty and of never having a bonafide hit in his filmography, and Anil Kapoor, a boomer has-been teetering on the edge of complete anonymity, take out their individual frustrations out on each other. Anurag Kashyap has the final laugh however when he comes up with a plot for his next film that is sure to be a hit – he captures Sonam Kapoor, Anil Kapoor’s daughter who is now more famous than her father, and instructs a now rattled Anil Kapoor to find her.
A thrilling, cinema vertité-esque chase ensues that is, much to our chagrin, marred by tired thriller gimmicks towards the end. At one point, I wouldn’t have batted an eye if Anand Ahuja, Sonam’s fashionmonger husband, had come out as the perpetrator and claimed this whole film is a promotional piece for his sneaker boutique store, Veg Non Veg.
Still, it doesn’t take away from the brilliant audacity of this enterprise. An audacious, Archimedean brilliance that propels AK vs AK higher than the greatest meta film, the aforementioned Being John Malkovich.
If there is one annoying gripe that everyone in the world has against Bollywood is that they believe that it relentlessly copies Hollywood. This is wholly inaccurate and Phantom Films’ AK vs AK, the meta film to end all meta films, is an unassailable testament to that. Hollywood has never dared a feat this brave and bombastic and perhaps never will. This is the equivalent to having Tom Hanks duke it out with David Fincher in a bleak, grimy alternate universe filled with chaos and discord.
For the wholesome Mr. India to be plucked from his world of Bollywood grandiosity and pushed into Mumbai muck is an uncomfortable sight but one that commands our attention. This will prove especially unsettling for older fans of his who have known him since his 80s heyday. In one instance, he’s frantically searching for his daughter’s captor in a sea of faceless everyday Mumbaikaars. In another, he’s begging an emotionally desensitized crowd to help him find said captor but all they want him to do is to dance for them like a trained circus animal. Finally, he collapses on a random, dirty street corner of Bombay, one that his previous, glitzy one hundred films always tried to hide, and experiences something that we as a public never imagine our impervious superstars to experience – debilitating mental exhaustion.
This is a middle-aged man facing up to the failed expectations of life. He starts looking at his frail, mortal arms and legs for the first time much in the same way Lady Macbeth stares at her hands in horror after they have murdered Duncan. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” In Anil Kapoor’s case, it’s his forty year old on-stage alter-ego, the one that we all know, that he’s now killed.
