Director Vikramaditya Motwane's AK vs AK is a wacky, meta-experiment that Bollywood was longing for. But what does it mean for Indian cinema?
In a career spanning more than a decade as a mainstream filmmaker, Vikramaditya Motwane has gone on to explore many genres. There’s no denying that he is one of the most refined, yet underrated, talents in Bollywood. His latest offering, AK vs AK, strives to give the content-hungry viewers on OTT a taste of originality amid the muck of unabashed Bollywood mediocrity.
Taking an apparent jibe at the workings of the industry, the storyline of AK vs AK kicks off when a controversial film director (Anurag Kashyap) and an ageing movie star (Anil Kapoor) go hammer and tongs to humiliate each other in an interview, as the live audience watches in shock and cheers. Things get uglier when the two stalwarts get personal and the mudslinging starts.
The fact that AK vs AK is a wacky, meta-experiment that Bollywood was longing for takes us back to a dark meta-comedy like writer-director Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, whose storyline follows the struggles of a writer as he tries to make a film adaptation of a book. In due time, it is revealed that the adaptation the writer, Charlie Kaufman, is trying to write, is more or less the film that the viewer is watching.
The fact that these meta-experiments successfully involve the audience in the narrative by smoothly blurring the lines between reality and fiction is what sets the genre apart.
Therefore, it can be claimed that Vikramaditya Motwane’s latest, apart from being a hostage thriller on the surface, is also a possible introduction to a new genre of mainstream filmmaking in India, one that could come within the ambit of 'reality fiction'.
While this concept is not entirely new to the cinematic universe, there certainly is a paucity of movies in the genre.
Another title that comes eerily close to projecting reality while narrating an engrossing fictitious tale is Malayalam cinema's recently released C U Soon, which is written and directed by Mahesh Narayan, and which thrives on its virtual screenplay and cinematography while promising to pave way for the ‘computer screen’ genre within the country.
However, in AK vs AK, Motwane attempts to cast light on the real-world controversies of the Hindi film industry. He allows his Bhavesh Joshi Superhero lead, Harshvardhan Kapoor, to suck up to the trailblazing director in Kashyap, all while taking jibes at his own movies.
To add to the theatrics, Anurag Kashyap’s trademark style of movie-making, one that sees him bring out the humour in the darkest of situations, is put to blatant use here.
Credit has to be given to OTT platforms for encouraging independent filmmakers to carve a niche for themselves by making off-beat products on a modest budget with tighter scripts, sans the burden of immediate box office returns.
Therefore, the rise of streaming platforms to prominence shall only bode well for directors like Motwane who, even after being in this industry for almost a decade-and-a-half, may just be coming into their own.
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