Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance is a heartfelt look at the process of transition from little person to showbiz big shot what it entails, and what it means. This is the kind of film where a superstar like Hrithik Roshan (playing a superstar named Zafar Khan) puts his personal demons up on screen for all of us to see, as he looks across a party floor at Vikram (a wonderful Farhan Akhtar), a struggler until not too long ago who’s now a hero because Zafar weaselled out of the part. And you can almost hear Zafar/Roshan wondering if this new hero will eventually ease him out.
Vikram, meanwhile, battles his own demons, when he submits his name for an audition and when Abhi (Arjun Mathur) wonders if perhaps he should too. Abhi is Vikram’s friend, so the answer to the question should be yes, but Abhi is also a fellow struggler, and therefore competition. You can see the wariness in Vikram’s eye even as he endorses Abhi’s idea. Vikram finds it far easier to be supportive of the career of his girlfriend Sona (Konkona Sen Sharma, who, needless to say, is exceptional), because they will never have occasion to fight over the same parts. And yet, despite his words of encouragement and his hastily scribbled declarations of love, theirs is the furthest thing from an ideal love story. It isn’t that Vikram doesn’t love Sona; it’s just that (like most people in showbiz) he loves himself more. But at no point does Luck By Chance insist that these people are monsters. If anything, these insecurities, these eggshell egos, make them all the more human. At one point, Vikram enters a room filled with aspiring actors, each one as likely to land the part, and you instantly sense what it must be like to be a struggler in a sea of strugglers. Where films like Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon isolated the anxieties of a single showbiz aspirant, Luck By Chance gives us an eagle’s eye view.
Luck By Chance is strongest when it deals with these characters, and it is weakest when it resorts to caricatures. The satire comes off as soft as Rishi Kapoor’s unapologetic midsection. The actor is perfectly cast as Rolly, a hapless producer strung along by the whims of stars who are young enough to be his children, and he offers some priceless double takes. But when Rolly is reduced to a buffoon — the kind whose faith in astrology is oh-so-easy to skewer — it doesn’t stick, and these broad, Bollywood Calling out-takes are such an uneasy fit in a film that’s otherwise so understated. I also couldn’t see why the film-within-this-film had to be so obviously trashy, the kind we used to watch in the Eighties where the hero and heroine would roll down the hill locked in each other’s arms, but carefully positioned side-by-side so their loins didn’t lock. Considering the period Luck By Chance is set in, when Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is playing at a Mumbai multiplex, why invoke such visions of a Bollywood that’s all but extinct? Despite these half-hearted concessions to Bollywood as a crazy circus (explicitly acknowledged in the staging of a dazzling song sequence), Zoya isn’t so much entertainer as examiner. She’s a thoughtful miniaturist — even her shots are carefully composed, their ins and outs cautiously in tune with the emotions of the scenes. Zoya’s touch is so delicate, it’s not till a wife demands an explanation that you fully register that the husband has been having an affair all along. As a result, Luck By Chance is a somewhat cold film. The discrete emotional beats don’t quite accrue into an epiphany. In an early scene set in acting class, after underplaying a part, Vikram is told that commercial cinema needs “projection” and “energy” — and these two qualities are most visibly absent in Luck By Chance as well. Zoya wants to underplay a story about the most overplayed of film industries, and there are times this approach makes her film appear less than the sum of its sharply etched vignettes.
But what vignettes they are — illuminated as much by the themes up front and centre as the throwaway moments. In one of the film’s best scenes, Zafar, in his car, is accosted by urchins on the street. He ignores them at first, but he gives in and makes faces to entertain them. In that brief instant, he’s almost one of these little people, one among them — but then you see that the windows are still up and he’s locked away in a world of his own. Other films may have better captured the dynamic ebb and flow of this world, but few have cupped an ear to its chest and listened so unflinchingly to its erratic heartbeat.