Delhi-6
Synopsis:
Halfway through the film, Abhishek Bachchan is standing right in the middle of a chaotic, dusty old Delhi street holding up a giant, terrifying monkey-like creature costume while wearing this weirdly specific striped hooded sweatshirt that actually looks kind of cozy even though everyone around him is totally losing their minds and screaming about supernatural beasts. But to understand why he's holding a monkey suit and why the whole neighborhood is in absolute panic, you have to look at how this started, which was when he played an American-born guy named Roshan who flies all the way from New York City just to escort his ailing grandfather, played brilliantly by the one and only Amitabh Bachchan, back to their ancestral home in the heart of Chandni Chowk. You wouldn't think a simple family trip would derail into total madness, but this is one of those classic bollywood movies where nothing is ever normal and every single neighbor has a massive secret or an intense grudge. Anyway, Roshan gets completely overwhelmed right away by the sheer volume of humanity, the stray cows, the tangled electrical wires everywhere, and the endless maze of narrow alleyways that make up the neighborhood of Delhi-6. He's trying to adjust to the sensory overload while also dealing with his grandfather's strict medical needs, and he keeps running into this spirited, ambitious local girl named Bittu, brought to life by Sonam Kapoor, who's secretly dreaming of escaping her traditional life to become a famous singing reality show star, even though her family keeps trying to marry her off to some boring guy. She's got this particular scarf she wears through half the scenes that has these little silver bells on the fringe that jingle whenever she stomps away in anger, which she does a lot because Roshan keeps accidentally offending her or just looking completely lost like a total tourist who doesn't know anything about how the local culture operates.
So then the plot gets super crowded with like twenty different side characters, including this corrupt local politician, a bitter sweet-maker played by Atul Kulkarni who has a massive chip on his shoulder because of the caste system, and Divya Dutta playing a lower-caste woman who faces brutal daily discrimination that everyone just ignores because they're too busy gossiping. They all live together in this tight-knit community where everyone's business is public property, and Om Puri is running around playing a grumpy local leader who's constantly yelling at people about municipal problems. The neighborhood feels so alive and messy, filled with random goat vendors, pigeon flyers on the rooftops, and endless cups of chai. Roshan tries to fit in by helping out at the family haveli and taking long walks with his grandfather, and he slowly starts falling for Bittu because she's fierce and doesn't take any of his polite American nonsense. The romance builds up slowly through shared glances across crowded courtyards and rooftop conversations where they talk about their totally different worlds. Then the monkey-man terror starts. A mysterious masked attacker or demon is jumping from roof to roof biting people in the dark, and everybody in town loses their collective minds, blaming it on bad omens and religious tensions between the Hindu and Muslim residents who suddenly start eyeing each other with deep suspicion. Paranoia takes over the whole place overnight, and people are sleeping with sticks and iron rods, terrified of the dark.
Right after that, the community completely tears itself apart over the panic, and things get deadly serious when riots almost break out because someone starts a rumor that the monster is from a specific religious minority group. Roshan tries to play peacemaker and uses his outsider perspective to show everyone how ridiculous they're being, reminding them that they've lived side-by-side for generations and shouldn't let fear turn them into monsters themselves, dropping the memorable line that the real kala bandar is inside our own heads. He races through the chaotic streets in that weird monkey suit to prove a point about how fear is just an illusion we create to hurt each other, but the angry mob doesn't listen right away and beats him half to death in the middle of the public square before they finally realize what they've done and stop fighting each other to carry his bloody body away from the dust. Amitabh Bachchan's character cries over him, and everyone has a massive collective breakdown of guilt, realizing their petty prejudices almost killed an innocent guy. The grandfather dies peacefully in his sleep shortly after all the neighborhood drama settles down and people actually start treating each other with basic human decency again, which is pretty wild considering how toxic everyone was acting twenty minutes earlier. Roshan heals up and decides to stay in India for a while longer instead of rushing back to New York, and he looks out over the crowded skyline of the city as the sun sets behind the massive pigeons taking flight from a rooftop cage.
Roshan walks down the steps of the haveli, breathes in the heavy Delhi air, and closes the heavy wooden door behind him.
The pigeon coop on the roof of the Ali Baba house in Chandni Chowk is painted a bright, slightly desperate turquoise that keeps catching the afternoon glare when the handheld camera dips too fast. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every single time the action cut back up there, mostly because it looks entirely too clean for a dusty Delhi pigeon loft that has supposedly been housing birds for four generations. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra wants us to feel the grime and the sweat of the walled city right from frame one, yet someone in the art department clearly forgot to scuff the props before the cameras rolled.
That kind of messy, almost accidental detail runs all through the first hour of Delhi-6, which tries so hard to capture the chaos of old Delhi that it frequently trips over its own shoelaces. The screenplay, credited to Mehra and Prasoon Joshi, operates on the assumption that if you throw enough street vendors, stray cows, corrupt municipal workers, and eccentric neighbors into the frame, a coherent society will somehow assemble itself out of the noise. Abhishek Bachchan plays Roshan, an NRI kid who brings his ailing grandmother back from America to die in her ancestral alleyways, and the script treats him less like a protagonist and more like a human camera on legs. He wanders through narrow lanes with a handycam, gasping at the cow dung and smiling at the street cricket while the soundtrack pumps out a heavy dose of Prasoon Joshi poetry that tells us we are experiencing the soul of India. It is a very loud, very earnest Bollywood movie that can rarely sit still long enough to let a scene breathe without someone shouting dialogue over a blaring horn.
Abhishek has this habit of dropping his shoulders and widening his eyes whenever Roshan is supposed to look bewildered by the local customs, which makes him look less like an American-raised graphic designer and more like a tourist who just lost his wallet in a crowded bazaar. He doesn't quite match the lived-in ease of his co-stars who actually seem like they belong on those sets, though he tries hard during the rooftop conversations. Sonam Kapoor, making her debut here as the aspiring television-star neighbor Bittu, has a wonderful, ferocious energy that mostly survives the director's obsession with filming her through gauzy, romantic filters. When she stands on her balcony and yells down at the neighborhood busybodies, she reminds me of Waheeda Rehman in Guide, bringing that same fierce, independent spark to a narrative that keeps trying to put her in a box marked traditional romance. Her dialogue delivery is sometimes a bit flat, but she has a camera presence that cuts right through the sloppy editing of her introductory sequences.
The supporting cast does the heavy lifting that the lead actors can't quite manage. Om Puri as the neighborhood patriarch and Divya Dutta as the put-upon sweeper woman deliver performances that feel entirely untethered from the artificiality of the central plot. When Dutta's character breaks down in the courtyard after a minor humiliation, the camera doesn't need to push in for a dramatic close-up because her whole body is already vibrating with exhaustion. Atul Kulkarni plays a Hindu fanatic with a terrifyingly reasonable tone of voice, avoiding the mustache-twirling traps that usually sink these villains in typical Hindi movies. Then there is Amitabh Bachchan, who shows up in flashbacks as the grandfather, wrapped in white khadi and speaking in riddles about religious tolerance that sound like they were pulled directly from a high school civics textbook. He brings immense gravity to scenes that frankly do not deserve him, reading lines about the Hindu-Muslim divide with the weary authority of a man who has played this exact scene in twenty other productions over the course of his career.
Cinematographer Binod Pradhan shoots the dense neighborhoods with a restless, churning energy that makes you feel the claustrophobia of the alleys, though he occasionally relies too heavily on slow-motion shots of dust motes dancing in sunbeams. A.R. Rahman provides a score that ranges from the transcendent to the aggressively annoying, particularly the title track which plays three separate times in the first forty minutes just to remind us which movie we are watching. That recurring needle-drop gets exhausting very quickly, especially when the song is layered over standard montage footage of Roshan riding his bicycle through traffic while local children wave at him. It feels like editorial panic, as if the director didn't trust the visual storytelling to convey the protagonist's growing affection for the city, so he had to turn up the chorus to eleven.
Underneath the sprawling, often messy narrative about monkeys, religious riots, and family secrets, the film is really asking how a modern individual negotiates inherited prejudices without losing their connection to home. That is a heavy question for a mainstream project that also wants to feature a dancing monkey god subplot and a tragic romance, and the seams between the social commentary and the romantic comedy begin to fray badly around the midpoint. The magical realism involving the mysterious Kala Bandar—the black monkey terrorizing the neighborhood—starts out as an effective metaphor for communal paranoia before collapsing into heavy-handed allegory by the time the climax rolls around. You can see the exact moment the writers decided the audience wouldn't get the point on their own, so they had a character literally stand up in the middle of a street riot and deliver a speech that explains the subtext of the entire narrative.
There is a genuinely brave, messy film struggling to get out of Delhi-6, one that would rather examine the small, petty cruelties of neighborhood gossip than preach about national unity, but it keeps getting sidetracked by its own good intentions. The ending abandons all realism in favor of a celestial journey that feels earned on an emotional level yet completely unearned on a narrative one, leaving the viewer stranded between gritty social observation and pure fantasy. It is not a complete disaster, but it is certainly not the revelation its ardent defenders claim it to be, sitting somewhere in the middle as a fascinating, frustrating artifact of a major director trying to capture an entire country inside a two-hour-and-twenty-minute frame and dropping half the pieces on the pavement.