MUMBAI: India have seen actors turn into stars, stars turn into demi-gods, and demi-gods turn into heads of state. But despite a fancy theatre in Mumbai briefly housing a beloved Superhero and a hard-boiled spy, there were scores of people standing in wait for one man.
Who’d have thought that before I could absorb the momentous occasion of being one of the select few who watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey much before the rest of the world did, I would be bombarded with a geographical question. A young fan stopped me in my tracks on the Red Carpet and asked,
“Will Nolan be coming out of this gate?” It was an almost 30-meter carpet, and I was stopped 8-10 times and asked variations of the same question. They didn’t want to know whether I saw the film, how good Matt Damon and Tom Holland were, or whether the film stayed true to the Greek epic. They wanted confirmation that I had crossed paths with Nolan, as though that fleeting proximity carried cinematic prestige. They wanted to know if Nolan was as charismatic as they had envisioned.
This wasn’t a group of people who were waiting to dance a signature step , or utter a famous punch dialogue , or play dress-up for their social media accounts. It was a crowd that was filled with students still in their uniforms. It was a gathering of salaried employees who still had their company ID cards dangling around their necks. It wasn’t a group that wanted to take a selfie for posterity, but rather to narrate the story of how they braved the odds to get a glimpse of the man whose films had hit their collective imagination.
In a city that has seen big stars shine, Nolan’s presence in Mumbai became a pilgrimage for those who believed in him.