Some may see this as idle pastiche, though it aptly reflects the characters’ own painstaking attempts at occidental self-styling: Young street punk Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor, grandson of golden-age Bollywood idol Raj) is rechristened “Johnny” when he begins work as a lackey for a sharp-suited local crime lord, ultimately managing the American Art Deco-style jazz club that gives the film its name. A recurring line of dialogue is appropriated from “The Roaring Twenties” (itself excerpted onscreen), a climactic shootout slavishly restages Brian De Palma’s “Scarface,” and so on and so forth. When another states that “life is not ‘Double Indemnity,'” he’s only partially correct: Life, at least as “Bombay Velvet” knows it, simply follows a different frame of genre reference, as Kashyap packs proceedings with unveiled allusions to gangster-cinema touchstones. It’s a line perfectly representative of a script that’s bigger on suds than subtlety, and hyper-conscious throughout of its medium - its every character living in a movie of their own making. “Our love story will be epic our life, a smash hit,” our hero informs his paramour toward the end of a sprawling narrative that has already seen its fair share of drama writ large.
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