'Ekk Albela' review: This Bhagwan Dada biopic falls short of 'Harishchandrachi Factory'

A first day show of Shekhar Sartandel’s Bhagwan Dada biopic, Ekk Albela felt somewhat like a geriatric ward, in the best sense possible. I sat next to a prosperous-looking octogenarian in a crisp white safari suit who munched on popcorn and betrayed no sign of emotion whatsoever during the film. There were a few 20 and 30-somethings in the audience who had somehow tripped on Bhagwan Dada’s immortal songs and were perhaps curious to know more about the short and portly man who launched the dance step that most Indians have resorted to at least once for maximum swag with minimum effort, the slight hip swing that was so successfully adopted as a signature move by Amitabh Bachchan and Govinda. The film’s subject is a treasure mine. Bhagwan Abhaji Palav aka Master Bhagwan was the classic rags-to-riches-to- rags story, the erstwhile Douglas Fairbanks of India, a silent era action star turned producer and director who rode the crest of super-stardom with Albela and then spiraled to oblivion. [caption id=“attachment_2855304” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Still from ‘Ekk Albela’[/caption] Unfortunately, the filmmakers have been saddled with little research material, and they don’t overcome that handicap. The film opens in the 1930s with a young Bhagwan (Mangesh Desai) shouting Gandhian slogans and enduring his father’s taunts for reasons that aren’t completely explained. The story lurches ahead with fast-moving, disjointed sequences like that one where Bhagwan leaves home to work with a paanwaala in Central Mumbai, meets a Muslim girl and falls in love only to be told by her to go back home and make something of himself. His chance meeting with film buff Baburao Pehelwan at an akhada sparking an interest in acting in dodgy action films, beginning with the role of a hunchback in Bewafa Aashiq, is quickly dispensed with. Sartendel and his co-writer Amol Shetge pen some crowd-pleasing one liners — ‘If you don’t dream above your layaki/aukaad, why dream at all?’ — which help in building the underdog narrative, but those rare dramatic moments stand out awkwardly in the choppy screenplay. In the absence of any emotional connect with the story, Desai steps in to save the day. The actor goes beyond his physical resemblance to Bhagwan and owns the film, sailing through with easy charm, charismatic screen presence, bulging eyeballs and a delightful Cheshire grin. Given the era’s exaggerated expressions, Desai could easily have slipped into gimmicky territory, but he isn’t OTT, caricature-like or plain annoying, even for a second. The film gathers momentum and atmosphere considerably post-interval when the focus is on the making of Bhagwan’s magnum opus, Albela. There’s a lovely scene in which Raj Kapoor (an amusing casting decision with a requisitely slim, fair but rather uncharismatic young chap playing the showman) books the entire lot of the industry’s group dancers for an ambitious song sequence — one assumes this was for Awara which released in 1951, the same year as Albela and Guru Dutt’s Baazi — leaving Bhagwan minus any background dancers one night before picturising his iconic Shola Jo Bhadke… number. Ever the doughty improviser, Bhagwan picked up a crew of stuntmen and ‘taught’ them to dance overnight. Desai nails the adorable dancing bits, where he’s joined by Geeta Bali (Vidya Balan, in a special appearance) Balan must have signed her first Marathi film for the sole purpose of having a blast shooting the songs Shola jo bhadke and Bholi surat dil ke khote which are choreographed verbatim, right down to the costumes of the group dancers in the original songs, the sets and steps. Her resemblance to Bali is striking, and the actor mercifully restrains any impulse to copy the vintage superstar’s vivacious mannerisms on screen. The really meaty tracks — Bhagwan’s power play with Albela’s Bombay distributor Chandubhai Mehta (Vidyadhar Joshi, ever reliable) and his affectionate and light-hearted banter with protégé and music composer C Ramchandra (a genteel and very likeable Vighnesh Joshi) should have been given more screen time. Here’s when the film could have surpassed its biopic cred to paint a wider canvas on the golden age of Hindi cinema, but it manages to do so only in inconsistent spurts. (Sidebar — If the skinny lady with two plaits in the recording studio is meant to be Lata Mangeshkar, props to the team for that detailing!) Baban Adagale’s art direction has an uneven graph but hits a couple of high notes, especially towards the end, when Albela strikes gold in its second week at Bombay’s Imperial Theatre. The film is shot almost entirely on sets and Bhagwan’s meteoric rise to fame — he owned Lallubhai Mansion in Dadar, a bungalow in Chembur and a fleet of seven cars — as well as Bombay’s cinematic landscape is criminally unexplored. Vidyadhar Bhatte’s make-up and the costumes are spot-on, though. The dialogues are equally distributed in Hindi and Marathi and transitions flow smoothly. Throughout watching Ekk Albela, I couldn’t help compare it to Paresh Mokashi’s 2010 gem, Harishchandrachi Factory, which had infused whimsy, humour, incredible warmth and a dash of imagination into what could have otherwise been a docu-style look at Dadasaheb’s Phalke’s story. The makers of Ekk Albela missed that bus. An ordinary-looking Marathi man, Bhagwan was a serial risk-taker; he introduced Hindi cinema’s first fist fight, produced its first horror film, Bhedi Bangla. Just like fate — and one risk too many — which drove the man into penury after super success, the film too, takes a few heartening leaps and falls short.