Superboys of Malegaon – A Contrived If Charming Tribute to D.I.Y. Cinema (Early Review)

Shot in 2008 and released in 2012, Faiza Ahmad Khan’s Hindi documentary Supermen of Malegaon instantly became a benchmark film in the growing roster of “cinema about the love of cinema,” in no small part due to its fervent passion for both the scrappiness of cobbled-together filmmaking and the titular city whose own trials mirrored those of its residents. Like The Disaster Artist if its subject film wasn’t one propped-up by years of notorious half-praise, Khan’s under-seen film about an under-seen moviemaking hub embodies a communal spirit that reminds us what cinema can be—even if not always, in a traditional sense, “good.”

Naturally, the logical course of action would be to remake this story into a fictional narrative for those too deterred from documentary cinema to find entertainment value in the educational. Given the increase in length—just five minutes shy of double the runtime!—it seems apparent that Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon would take a few liberties in adapting this story, but what follows is, like its predecessor, a flawed if fascinating treatise on the highs and lows of grabbing a camera and heading off with your buddies into the celluloid unknown.

In Malegaon, the wonder boy with the camera is Nasir (Gourav), a young man running a dilapidated theatre with his older brother. As business begins to dip due to Nasir’s insistence on forsaking Hindi films in favour of dusty trash (some irrelevant works from nobodies like checks notes Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, he comes up with an ingenious idea to record and remix the footage of different films and splice them together; what exists as a pirating practice to censor steamy material in Indian cinema here becomes a tool for creatively mixing Jackie Chan and his silent idols into a highlights-only reel of audience-ready action.

This plan goes quite well… until it doesn’t; those who have seen Be Kind Rewind will know that the fuzz doesn’t take too kindly to piracy, and Nasir’s new plan to get things back on track also mirrors that of Gondry’s twee film: make your own movie, one that the authorities can’t touch! Ironically, this move towards copyright-free originality is entirely based on remaking the popular Bollywood film Sholay, but hey, whatever works; Nasir and his friends have picked a topic, so now it’s time to crack their knuckles and get to work.

In just about any other film, the making of this first Do-It-Yourself feature would compose the bulk of the conflict, but Kagti essentially resolves the making of Malegaon Sholay by the halfway point; from there, Superboys of Malegaon pivots from the trials and tribulations of making a film to the trials and tribulations of being successful at it. It’s a noteworthy pivot, as Kagti and screenwriter Varun Grover opt to tackle this beast from as many angles as possible. Still, in the end, it’s clear that the lacking concision of the preceding documentary is missed.

As one would hope in a film of this nature, Kagti and Grover care about their characters beyond the scope of their placement in Nasir’s arc; time, brief as it may be, is spent with several of them to give some greater colour to their own hopes and dreams. As it stands, though, Superboys of Malegaon proves a bit too lethargic to handle so many journeys within the scope of it’s primary subject’s lesson in humility.

That Nasir himself is quickly shown to be a less-than-desirable protagonist is a compelling shift, particularly insofar as, by virtue of the film’s emphasis on friendly collaboration, Kagti and Grover (and everybody else, for that matter) seem to be offering something of an anti-auteurist argument for cinema; regardless of whether or not one subscribe to it, this certainly proves to be fertile ground for making such an argument. To make that point, though, Kagti struggles to lay out Nasir’s flaws in such a way that they feel organic, instead coming across as quickly stacked upon one another in the start of the second act. Is Nasir a sellout, a money-grubber, a fame-whore, a control freak, or just generally somewhat of a dick? Kagti’s answer: yes.

There are, of course, directors who are all of those things at once, but Superboys of Malegaon is on the fast-track to make that case across what’s already an increasingly sluggish runtime, resulting in a few developmental contrivances not unlike a script being whipped up on the fly for a minuscule production. In any case, when Reema Kagti sends her Superman into the sky as a symbol of Malegaon’s enduring filmic spirit, the hero’s wayward travel does eventually lead to a proper emotional landing.

still courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

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Julian Malandruccolo

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