Zoya Akhtar’s brilliant debut film Luck By Chance, which starred Farhan Akhtar, Konkona Sen Sharma, Rishi Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Juhi Chawla and Hrithik Roshan in a special appearance, released 16 years ago. To celebrate this outstanding film, we have a fascinating look back as Subhash K Jha revisits the film about films and shares some inside stories from the director about the making of Luck By Chance.
Luck By Chance, a truly out-of-the-box outstanding work of subtle, sly, satirical, and whispering art, is filled with people whom you’re bound to have met in the fetid corridors of Bollywood or the Hindi film industry, as the star-mother Dimple Kapadia insists on calling it. Never before has the film industry been perceived with such intuitively internalised abundance. A subtle splendour galvanised by performances that range from the credible to the incredible takes the narrative to pinnacles of expressiveness.
The film industry is filled with such deliberately desensitised people who function within the fickle and frighteningly flamboyant film industry with gut-wrenching self-delusion.
The performances help to ignite the characters into states of subtle yet vivid shades. The ambitious mother-daughter (Dimple-Isha Sharwani) pair, the strugglers, wannabes, and losers…oh yes, every character in Luck By Chance possesses a luminously lived-in quality, bringing to the surface feelings, thoughts, and images that are normally not brought out on screen.
Every player—parodic, poignant, and pitched perfectly—makes savage fun of the very foibles that they probably practice with masterful, manipulative hands in real life. Zoya Akhtar gets into the star space without a moment’s aggression in her storytelling. The moments that define the relationships are built stealthily. This is a world that every person in the Mumbai film industry (for Dimple’s sake, let’s not call it Bollywood!) knows first-hand.
It is easy to fall in love with every performance in this intimate yet generic insider’s look at the workings of the entertainment industry. But the one that I carried home with me was Sheeba Chadha. A marvel of subtle writing, Sheeba plays a podgy, cunning, but simple-hearted producer’s sister-in-law whose husband (Aly Khan) is carrying on with a struggling starlet right under her naïve eyes. One not-so-pleasant afternoon, Sheeba barges into her husband’s van and sees a red-nosed, bleary-eyed Konkona Sen Sharma (who has just been told she doesn’t get a role she has been waiting all her career for). Sheeba senses what’s going on. But she quickly digresses her mind from her husband’s extra-marital affair.
The debutante director occupies that space with an unostentatious spirit, nurturing interludes between characters (the two strugglers Farhan Akhtar-Konkona, producer-wife Rishi Kapoor-Juhi Chawla, ideologically separated co-actors Farhan-Arjun Mathur with the cautious care of a mother who wants to bring up her child with the right values without drawing attention to her nurturing acumen.
This is a work of tender, subtle care with moments whose immense value strikes you after the wonderfully conversational dialogues (Javed Akhtar at his expressive best) have had their say. At heart, Luck By Chance is a story of one man’s plunge into the morass of compromise as he heads towards his dreams. Farhan gets what can only called another chance to do the histrionic dance. As he goes from wide-eyed wannabe to a morally devalued creature, the narrative charts his course with savage humour.
This is a work that oozes outstanding acting talent from every nook and corner. Whether it’s Aly as an on-the-move producer or Arjun as a struggling actor who would rather struggle in theatre than compromise, every character plays a person you’ve met if you’ve ever been a part of the Mumbai film industry.
Super stand-out performances by Rishi, Dimple, Sheeba, Hrithik Roshan (as a superstar on the skids) and of course, Konkona, whose best performance this is. On the deficit side (yes, even a film of such high order must face the music), the narrative, with its inbuilt jokes and references, is too much a Bollywood insider’s job, largely inaccessible to the common man who wouldn’t know the name of Ranbir Kapoor’s secretary and couldn’t care less.
On most levels, Luck By Chance stands tall and luminous, portraying the world of arclights with a synthesis of style, sympathy, and substance that is the opposite of the synthetic way the world of showbiz is generally portrayed in cinema. What stays with you are moments like the one where the struggling hero approaches the once glamorous star mother at a party and wins her over… a moment that builds up into a muffled explosion of ambitious scheming achieved at a place where the sound of broken hearts is inaudible.
And Zoya can’t praise actress Konkona Sen Sharma enough. “She completely spoils a director with her disciplined approach. I wonder how I’ll find another actress to match her easy-going professionalism. She was literally a part of our crew. Where will I find someone who’s brilliant and so easy to work with? And Hrithik played a star named Zafar Khan. Getting him was quite easy. I was working with him on another film, Kismat Talkies. And when that got delayed, I went back to the one that I wanted to do earlier. He liked Luck By Chance too and wanted to play Zafar Khan. His song is a homage to all item songs in Bollywood. My film is about success and failure, winning and losing, and self-worth. It could’ve been set in any other industry.”
Zoya Akhtar says she virtually had to knock on all the big doors of filmdom for casting someone in the lead role, but no one agreed. “It doesn’t help to be this one’s daughter and that one’s brother. Farhan’s name got me access to the stars, but no one does a film for who has sent you. The hardest part was the endless waiting to find the actor.”
The lead role of a struggling actor was offered to Saif Ali Khan and Vivek Oberoi. They wanted Zoya to change the ending because they didn’t want to play a Bollywood struggler. But Zoya is happy with the final outcome. “I got the cast I wanted, and now the climate in movie theatres has changed drastically. Audiences are open to all kinds of experiences. When I started casting for Luck By Chance, not many directors were willing to push the envelope. The thing about my film is that the hero is a bit of an ambitious user and liar. A lot of our heroes were apprehensive about playing a grey character. They wanted me to change the end to make the protagonist look brighter. I refused. You’ve got to stick to your convictions,” she said.
She adds, “I went through these times when I felt I just didn’t fit in. I went through lows when I wondered when I’d finally be able to make a film. But the trick was to hang in there. Thank God for family and friends. Thank God for Farhan. They kept my morale from sagging to ground level. I was dying to get behind the camera. My producer, Ritesh Sidhwani, kept telling me not to get low; we’ll find the right guy. Little did we realise that the right guy was sitting in the room with us.”
According to Zoya, Farhan was the best thing to happen to Luck By Chance.”It was (director) Reema Kagti who suggested I do Luck By Chance with Farhan. It was the best decision I could make. He knew the script in and out. He was part of it from the first draft. And every time an actor would say no to my film, I’d discuss it with him and wonder where I was going wrong. I didn’t feel insecure; I felt sad and angry. I never felt what I was making was wrong. No one close to me suggested that I change the script to make the hero less grey. I know the character Farhan played. I’ve met him before this film. And I’ve cast lots of actors and stars from the industry either as themselves or as characters. I maintained a certain decorum with Farhan. It was hard. I tried to keep him not involved with what was going on off camera, so he’d focus on what he was doing.”
