The Fame Game
Directors: Bijoy Nambiar, Karishma Kohli
Writers: Nisha Mehta, Sri Rao
Cast: Madhuri Dixit, Sanjay Kapoor, Manav Kaul, Suhasini Mulay, Lakshvir Singh Saran, Muskkan Jaferi, Rajshri Despande, Gagan Arora
Streaming sites have become dumping grounds for films and television series. Often, they are akin to the boring serials we watch on television. I do not remember a good series after Gurgaon and The Family Man. The first was headlined by Pankaj Tripathi, and the second Manoj Bajpayee. Both are excellent actors, and the two series shone and enraptured me. But most others have been dissatisfying.
Netflix’s latest attempt at series, The Fame Game, appears to have been made with the single motive of giving the long-forgotten actress, Madhuri Dixit, a chance to get back into the limelight. Admittedly, she is not a bad actress, and still has the aura we saw in her a long time ago. But in a series with eight episodes – each 40 minutes-plus – one person alone cannot do justice. Manav Kaul is not bad either, but the rest of the cast are terribly disappointing.
And the plot itself has very little novelty, and this is what I gathered by watching the first six episodes given in advance to reviewers. In the very first, Anamika Khanna (Dixit) disappears, and her family of husband, Nikhil (Sanjay Kapoor), son Avi (Lakshvir Singh Saran) and daughter Amu (Muskkan Jaferi) have no clue about what could have happened. The mystery deepens when no ransom call comes, and the police with the investigating officer, Shobha Tiwari (Rajshri Deshpande), are equally flummoxed. Adding to all this confusion is Anamika’s mother, essayed with a touch of brilliance by Suhasini Mulay. (I still remember her in the 1969 Mrinal Sen-helmed Bhuvan Shome, which was a landmark in Indian cinema, heralding with some other movies, the country’s New Wave). She makes a nuisance of herself, and as we learn later, has been instrumental in pushing Anamika into a marriage she did not want.
When Amu gets a call from her mother in episode six, we are already aware that the ageing star is being held captive. We would know why in the climax.
But before we get to this, The Fame Game narrates in several flashbacks – which to me felt like a publicity campaign for Dixit’s dancing abilities – how Anamika’s and Manav Kaul’s (Khanna) brief affair in London two decades ago had left them agonising. He is divorced with a daughter, and she is in an unhappy relationship with Nikhil. To make matters worse, her son is always in a grumpy mood, trying to fight the demon in him, and Amu suffers from an inferiority complex. She craves to be a film actress, but feels that she does not have the looks of her mother.
The issue with The Fame Game is that like so many Indian movies and television series, it tries to get its plate overflowing, losing its focus and flow. At the very core, it is a mystery drama with a missing star, but this gets so diluted that the thrill of it all is completely lost. And, the cop appears like a caricature of what bumbling policemen used to be portrayed as in Indian cinema; Deshpande is a disaster.
But for gorgeous sets and eye-catching costumes worn by Dixit, directors Bijoy Nambiar and Karishma Kohli have not been able to present anything remotely compelling. Also written unimaginatively by Sri Rao and Nisha Mehta, The Fame Game is hardly worth a watch.
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