Supermen of Malegaon @ SILVERDOCS
Bryan Singer spent something like $200 million a few years back trying to revive the Superman movie franchise. Shaikh Nasir’s Malegaon ka Superman came somewhat more frugally: about two grand. But every rupee of that modest sum is on the screen. He shoots on a handheld digicam. A "dolly shot" consists of three guys stabilizing him and pushing him forward on a bicycle while he clutches the camera with both hands. And he sure isn’t going to hire a stunt double for Sheikh Shafique, the poor, scrawny bastard he’s cast as the Last Son of Krypton.
Like most of the population of Malegaon — a textile town 175 miles and a world removed from Mumbai, where India’s mainstream film industry cranks out more flicks each hear than Hollywood does — Shafique works in a power loom 14 hours a day, six days out of seven, for a weekly salary of about $25. The opportunity to appear in one of the films the workers flock to on Fridays, “surrender[ing] his consciousness,” as Nasir says, is too good to pass up, even though we see Safique suffer more than a few close calls. You will believe a man can fly, at least until he hits the turf like a sack of brittle bones. Twenty-five years old and illiterate, Shafique is such a sweet-natured, likable presence, you almost feel the blows along with him as he spares no bodily expense to replicate the stunts of a mega-budget, Yankee summer blockbuster.
Nasir’s film is the latest in his series of regionalized parodies of popular hits that began a decade ago with Malegaon ke Sholay, a sendup of Sholay, a well-known Indian thriller from 1975. Nasir has spent the decade since spoofing Bollywood; with his latest, superheroic opus, he graduates to spoofing Hollywood.
"In this comedy, Superman is a victim of many diseases. He is very troubled, “ Nasir tells us. (Hey, that sounds kind of like Superman Returns, the underwhelming Bryan Singer version.) Nasir’s films are about the only source of entertainment in Malegaon, where in addition to the backbreaking labor to which most residents are indentured, sectarian bloodshed compounds their woes. The town’s Muslim and Hindu populations coexist uneasily at best, violently at worst.
Faiz Ahmad Kahn’s absorbing movie-about-the-movie, Supermen of Malegaon, trains its eye not on the nobility of poverty, but the nobility of creativity. Like the great Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels, it reminds us there’s nothing frivolous about offering people whose lives are harder than most of us can imagine a moment, or two hours, of escape.
Supermen of Malegaon (79 min., subtitled) screens tonight at 10 p.m. and Thursday at 11 a.m. on a double bill with Cam Christiansen's The Real Place. Tickets are available here.