It’s pronounced “maa.lay.gao”, a screen note informs us, before Superboys of Malegaon gets properly underway. And that’s the tone of the entire film – nothing left to chance, a narrative that is laid out with one logical piece following another, nothing fancy, nothing tricksy, just the age-old “let’s do the show right here” tale, of an Indian guy in the small town of Malegaon in Maharashtra State, India, who decides to make movies – no money, no clue, just make them.
It’s brilliant. Feelgood, funny, dramatic, tear-jerking, a feast of emotional manipulation by director Reema Kagti and co, who retell the true story first told in the 2008 documentary Supermen of Malegaon, which gets an explicit big “shout out” in this film’s end credits.
This archetypal underdog movie starts off in 1997, where Nasir Shaikh (Anuj Duhan) runs a family cinema showing old Keaton and Chaplin films. Nasir is also the local wedding videographer and photographer and does a sideline in video rental. Even with all these plates spinning, business is not good, and it’s getting worse, his stern older brother Nihal (Gyanendra Tripathi) tells him. And so Nasir comes up with the idea of splicing together bits of old Keaton movies with his modern equivalent, Jackie Chan, and editing Chaplin together with Bruce Lee, to see if anyone will salute. People flock to the cinema. The money rolls in. Until the police arrive, beat everyone up and inform the Shaikhs that they’re infringing copyright.
All this is throat-clearing for what follows, when Nasir, wishing to taste success again, comes up with the idea of pastiching the most famous Bollywood movie of the era, Sholay, on the slenderest of shoestrings. A rousing speech to his crew of deadbeat friends, half of whom have no time for messing about of this sort, is followed by a montage sequence giving it to us in bullet points – auditions for actors good, bad and terrible, local locations scouted, people learning lines earnestly, cameras tied to bicycle handlebars, Nasir avidly watching on-set TV interviews for tips, all leading up to the triumphant premiere, Nasir sick with nerves outside the cinema while the audience inside laps up his movie.
There are probably a couple too many montage sequences in this movie but on the upside they do leave a space for characters to be fleshed out. Nasir’s love for a local beauty and his eventual marriage to someone else. Farogh (Vineet Singh), the film’s writer, shocked to find that the writer isn’t king after all, and getting shirty about it. Shafique (Shashank Arora), the gopher who wants to be an actor but can’t give voice to his ambition. Trupti (Manjiri Pupala), a wedding singer recruited to be the film’s female lead – externally sniffy about this low-grade project, secretly delighted.
They are distinct characters and stop the film feeling like another version of The Full Monty or something similarly underdoggy. Even so, at all times we know exactly how this story is going to go – boy wins movie, boy loses movie, boy gets movie back.
So, yes, Malegaon ke Sholay is a massive hit and makes everyone locally famous. It makes Nasir relatively wealthy, and then the gang start to fall out over what they see as the unfair distribution of the spoils. Boy loses movie. Several fallow years follow until, symbolically, the Shaikhs cinema goes bust and is turned into a restaurant, before Nasir roars back with his big idea, a remake of Superman.
How properly perfect the cast are, particularly Duhan, Singh and Arora, and how joyfully simple and moving the message – people coming together in a joint enterprise, whether it’s making a film or watching it at the local fleapit, give life true meaning. It brought a tear to my lizard-like dry eye.
The Superboys of Malegaon – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
