Lost in the Twilight Zone with Amitabh Bachchan
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Aman in red suede pants and jacket walks down a deserted road at night. Another man in a sky blue jacket over a black shirt races across a bridge as gunfire explodes around him.
Yet another, in a deep blue shirt knotted at the waist, staggers out of a warehouse and is immediately carried off by a delirious crowd chanting his name. Any Hindi cinema fan could read these descriptions and tell you they’re all the same man. Most could probably name the films as well—Majboor, Sholay, Deewaar.
What would these fans make of a new film in which all these scenes appear in the space of 10 minutes? Cédric Dupire landed in India and was immediately confronted with Amitabh Bachchan. On posters, cinemas, hoardings, billboards, TV—the same man. “People are looking at him and projecting on his person their dreams and fantasies," Dupire told me over a Skype call.
“I started thinking, what is the life of someone whose picture is everywhere?" Dupire is a cinematographer and filmmaker based in Paris. His first feature-length documentary, Musafir (2004), was about folk musicians in Rajasthan. A decade ago, he made a short piece on actors and their fans, which got him thinking about Bachchan and the “fascination he generates in the real world".
He started gathering clips from films across six decades—Bachchan walking, running, peering suspiciously at mirrors, being tortured, dying, reappearing. These took the form of a feature documentary, The Real Superstar, which is playing at the Mumbai Film Festival (19-24 October). Dupire’s film is anything but a straightforward tribute, though.
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