Jubilee review: This is a visually stunning, love-hate story about the movies

Aparshakti Khurana as Binod Das/Madan Kumar in Jubilee, which released on Amazon Prime Video on April 7, 2023.

Imagine the headlines in the entertainment section of the newspaper: Roy Talkies is going to launch a new star. Defiant star wife prevented from elopement… Unknown talent shines on the silver screen… Seedy business of making movies… Long arm of the censors…

Presented by Vikramaditya Motwane, Soumik Sen, Atul Sabharwal’s Jubilee has all the glitz and glamour you would associate with the silver screen and the darkness and the seediness under the bright lights of the marquee.

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Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood made David Lynch say that it is ‘one hell of a good revenge film’ and by episode five you will be hearing Lynch speak to you ‘in film your intuition will come into play… it is the heart and mind working together to become inner knowing.’

And when Wamika Gabbi’s Niloufer sings in the club to attract the attention of the producer, you hear Geeta Dutt singing Aaiye Meherbaan instead. You wonder if Jubilee is Ashok Kumar’s story even if Rajendra Kumar was nicknamed Jubilee Kumar. If Prosenjit is channelling his inner Guru Dutt… You end up wondering if Jay Khanna was inspired by all director-actors who had moved to Bombay after the Partition and yearned to make movies about Punjab and the sarson ke khet…

The series will send you off on a nostalgia trip where Roy Talkies opens its Art Deco gates to a world where dreams are created. Prosenjit Chatterjee’s Srikant Roy wants to control everything and everyone connected to his movie studio. But his star wife Sumitra Devi (Aditi Hydari Rao) is no nightingale trapped in a gilded cage. She is planning to run away with Roy’s new discovered star Madan Kumar (he is Jamshed Khan, but as old Bollywood saying goes, ‘Yusuf Khan star kaise ban sakta hai?’). Roy can send his loyal acolyte Binod Das (Aparshakti Khurana) to bring back the couple and thwart their elopement plans, and Binod is successful too. Only political events like the Partition put a spoke in his car when he’s attempting to lure Jamshed (Nandish Singh Sandhu) back.

Binod loses Jamshed to the rioting mob and in a moment of weakness gives in to his own ambition of becoming Madan Kumar. His film Sungharsh is a hit, he is a success, but he is afraid of being found out. Success begets enemies, and Madan Kumar’s conscience is one of his biggest enemies. Not to mention Sumitra, who is forced to act with him pretending to love him on screen when she really hates him…

Roy will learn how Binod came to become Madan Kumar, so he will bind him with a contract. Roy is bound to his wife who owns the business and will try and sabotage it if she can. There are competing producers and upcoming directors who could start their own studio… Every character is bound to their own fates. Clawing, gnashing and fighting to succeed.

You feel empathy, you know these people lived and died for the movies, you have seen them struggle, answered the eternal question from the devil himself and sold their soul for 15 minutes of fame. And yes, you have measured your struggle in coffee spoons waiting outside offices for that one moment where you could get a foot in the door…

Jubilee’s characters are like Jay Khanna’s (Sidhant Gupta) shoes: exhausted by the struggle and a hole in their sole (soul) but wishing and praying for that one break, that one chance to be able to get up on the stage to sing with Madan Kumar.

I fell in love with the smooth crossover from singing stars to playback music, the invention of Radio Ceylon and how the movie companies outsmarted the political manoeuvrings of an official who preferred Indian classical music to film music and banned movie songs from radio waves. Real-life events have been incorporated magnificently in the show.

How Shakespearean is the Madan Kumar/ Binod Das conflict! The machinations of starlets to remain front and centre, demoralizing advice to writers like ‘tu drive kar, contacts bana, phir sunenge script’, affairs of the heart that need to be coldly dealt with, connections of politics and entertainment, all set in the backdrop of a freshly minted India and the fallout during the Partition make this series a compelling watch.

Wamiqa Gabbi in Jubilee.

Aparshakti Khurana does very often step out of his eternally sad expression and give us a treat as the reluctant celebrity haunted by Jamshed. Prosenjit’s Roy and his rival to be - Jay Khanna (played by Sidhant Gupta) tell a good story. Ram Kapoor’s sleazy producer and Wamika Gabbi’s starlet shine. The nexus of distributors and the vultures in the press who demand a show before release makes you say, ‘Who doesn’t know about that!’ There’s Arun Govil who is a never-say-die theatre wallah who sings us a Eechak Daana Beechak Dana version when he teaches the kids in the refugee camp about hope and theatre. Binod Das’s wife - played by Shweta Basu Prasad - reminds us that these stars were family men and their wives were often silent, supportive partners. The one little glitch of the character who looked the part but just fell short of being memorable by raising an eyebrow of disapproval like Nadira or being the contract-waving evil Lina Lamont from Singing In The Rain, holding an entire studio to ransom, was Aditi Rao Hydari.

Speaking of Nadira and Singing in the Rain, you will enjoy the umbrella sharing moment in the show. You will sink deeper into the rabbit hole of questions, ‘Is Jay Khanna, Raj Kapoor?’ and then see his jaunty walk and wonder if his character was based on Dev Anand. But the delicious colour palette of the episodes will make you forget there’s cricket to be watched. Amazon Prime Video has already hit one out of the park.

Jubilee is an unabashed celebration of cinema, a clever combination of real-life events and characters and presented in an irresistible fictional form that took seven years of dreaming, writing, creating.