Jubilee’s Lucky Charm: Sidhant Gupta’s Light-On-Feet, Happy-Go-Lucky Jay Khanna

Jubilee collapses as soon as it opens — the stilted, careful gait with which people speak and walk; their searching eyes; their deep voices; their considered pace; their studied postures. The mannered performance and forced stillness is intended to take us back in time, to the late 1940-early 1950s’ world of Bombay cinema. Director and co-creator Vikramaditya Motwane’s obsession with that era gave us Lootera (2013), a gossamer, tender love story that was a hallmark of that past decade. Motwane’s production house is even named Andolan Productions — after a flop film his grandfather made in 1951 (the title gets a namecheck in Jubilee). 

But with Jubilee, Amazon’s most expensive production in India, it’s the idea of that era rather than the fact of it that seems to have obsessed Motwane. The idea of a thing tends to always be neater than the thing itself. Neater, but also less abrasive, less citric, less exciting; amenable only to nostalgia, cherry picked from memory. Partition violence doesn’t feel like Partition violence when it’s filmed and choreographed with balletic elegance. There is an enter-stage-left starched stiffness, a suffocating polish to everything and everyone. Then, just as Jubilee is collapsing under its own lead-footed weight, the dullness is reversed in a remarkable swerve of charm by Sidhant Gupta’s performance as the actor-director Jay Khanna. 

Jay, the son of a theatre director, comes from Karachi to Lucknow to convince a friend to act in his play. Partition comes crashing down upon the subcontinent, riots ensue, his friend dies, and Jay, along with his family, find their way to then-Bombay and make their home in a refugee camp in Sion. It is here that his ascent to cinema begins. He falls in love with an actress (Wamiqa Gabbi as Niloufer) and through her is able to move a financier (Ram Kapoor as Shamsher Singh Walia) to back his dream project. Jay turns refugee land into a film studio. He becomes both actor and director. His meteoric burst to fame is pitched against that of Jubilee’s other star, Madan Kumar (Aparshakti Khurana) whose career graph sees an equally dramatic rise when he goes from doing grunt work for decades in Bombay’s leading studio, Roy Talkies, to becoming its money-spinning star. For Jay Khanna, a rank outsider, to emerge so suddenly is not just chance and circumstance, but charm too.  

There are soft nods to and reflections of Raj Kapoor — the actor director, son of a theatre personality, who also came to Bombay from Pakistan (though not during the Partition), and who was aided in his stardom by the Russians. The “khush-mizaji, zinda-dilli” tramp character from Kapoor’s Shree 420 has been grafted onto Jay Khanna. There are also hints of Dev Anand. When we first see him, he is dancing with a cigarette dangling from his lips, a hat he keeps shuffling in place. Then there is the smile that invokes the ghost of Shashi Kapoor’s youth. 

There is something extraordinarily, immediately charming about Sidhant Gupta’s performance of Jay Khanna. The way he, initially, tends to hold a cigarette between his middle finger and thumb, with his index finger as a protective hood; the way, with fame and money, he dangles it between index finger and middle finger; the way he dances, limbs loose; the way he sharply snaps his fingers with the index finger emerging erect from the clipped sound; the way he displays his empty pockets; the way he exhales forcefully every time he is relieved, ballooning his cheeks; the way he always keeps his lips apart (unlike the morose Madan Kumar who always has lips tightly pursed). To see Jubilee is to see his light-on-feet, happy-go-lucky magnetism translate into that of a heartbroken puppy. He is given both love and anger, failure and fortune, Hindi and Punjabi, and he erupts easily from one to the other. That Gupta can do this without either emotion seeming out of character, that he can make these forced, uncharacteristic transitions feel natural, speaks to the artistry of the actor. 

Gupta’s performance is one of the most exciting, endearing aspects of Jubilee, something that has the capacity to not just cut through a show, but also hoist it up. Characters are blazing when shown alongside Jay Khanna, actors are blazing when acting opposite Sidhant Gupta. For instance, to see Niloufer respond to Jay’s “Uff” with her own “Uff” is to be touched by love itself. Two women love Jay. To both he professes love. One on a dry beach. The other, on a wet street. Both are elevated to characters only through his love for them. The moment Niloufer leaves Jay’s side, she is reduced to the cliché of a starlet who hopes to beguile her way to the top. Similarly, Ram Kapoor’s role as a financier is stuck in a rotelearned money grabbing tone till he meets Jay Khanna. Then, Kapoor’s performance tilts into something not just electric but comical. This comes from a protective impulse — to hope that everything that happens to Jay Khanna, around Jay Khanna, keeps him safe.  

A lot of this is the writing. But there is such a thing, too, as cinematic presence. Part of that is, certainly, beauty, and Gupta is beautiful in an obvious sense of the word beauty. But part of cinematic presence is also that untranslatable, inarticulate intensity of being, one that grounds a scene, ruptures it with its pain, lifts it with its smile, and crumples it with its agony. In a theatre, while watching Jay Khanna on the big screen, a woman in the packed audience blows him a flying kiss. Another weeps with hope. They are not responding to his physical stature — which is lithe and loose, almost odd given how he is shown to stand up for the poor, the common mass. They are, instead, responding to that visceral blooming of hope in the heart. They are responding to stardom, one that is for Jay Khanna’s to take — and Sidhant Gupta should not be far behind.