Long Story Short: The Beauty and Brutality of ‘7 Star Dinosor Entertainment’

A short film does not imply that the story is short. Directors who embrace the format are aware of this. They know that the medium is rooted in the unsaid as much as the said. That an alphabet must reveal a hidden sentence. That a sliver of time must convey an entire world – a context, a culture, a fullness, a feeling – beyond the one we see. It’s also why the medium is most prone to gimmicks, where filmmaking and storytelling often compete against each other for attention. The gimmicks tend to define the film. For instance, I made a group short in college about a stylish black-and-white chess game. The twist, which comes in the end, is that the two players are blind. So every sly frame became a faceless wink to arrive at this twist. That’s all it was, eventually: A cheap parlour trick. Narrative and visual subterfuge. Nothing more. 

Now imagine this one-liner: A mockumentary about two brothers who dress as dinosaurs and perform at weddings, birthday parties and mall events. Their company (and the film’s title): 7 Star Dinosor Entertainment. It’s an endlessly fertile concept, the sort that gets a director all greedy and excited. The options are plenty. Imagine a Mumbai crime caper. Imagine a Wes Anderson-style eccentric dramedy. Imagine a surreal ode to cinema, where two desi Jurassic World superfans lose sight of the divide between fiction and reality. Imagine a nocturnal horror comedy. Or, if one wants to go deeper: Imagine a poignant short about the conflict between old and new entertainment (with the dinosaurs as a metaphor for the ‘extinction’ of vintage entertainers). All of these shorts would work, because the hook is already so good. The look is impossible to resist.

Yet, the biggest triumph of Vaishali Naik’s 7 Star Dinosor Entertainment is its ability to stop imagining and start existing. The 19-minute short has those striking vignettes, of course. We see brothers Sudhir and Binod ‘practicing’ their art while watching the Jurassic Park movies. We see them chasing terrified kids across the chawl at night. We hear them complain about how they’re still forced to dance to Bollywood songs despite their distinct T-Rex costumes. We see the two actors (Kapil Dev and Rahul Sahu) acting like they’re not acting on camera. We see Swati Jain’s cinematography get playful and witty with the dino-silhouettes and shadows and colours. But the film isn’t satisfied with these easy wins. The pathos comes from its real-world setting. It’s the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first hard lockdown, and the brothers are reminiscing about the glory days of their company. So they’re not just two entertainers who become dinosaurs for a living, they’re also two migrants stranded in the city without food, income and care. That’s the punchline. The humour is only a front for a tragedy. 

Their “exodus,” then, makes for the sight of two famished dinosaurs ambling through an apocalyptic landscape. Others like them are suffering or dead, thanks to a sociopolitical meteor strike. It’s a powerful parable, not just a pretty one. Some of it looks a little too staged, but I suppose that’s part of the genre trap. (For example, is the documentary chap still filming them when they’re starving to death in Mumbai? If not, it’s often hard to tell the footage from the story). The kids are a bit awkward, too. But the use of sound is evocative. One of the most haunting moments of the film features the two hungry brothers attacking each other over a piece of leftover cake, with their wild grunts morphing into dinosaur groans. They’re reduced to prehistoric beasts by a society that has invisibilized itself to make them feel alone. 

The meaning of the film is inextricable from its form, which is to say that the giant dinosaurs go hand in hand with India’s Covid-19 humanitarian crisis. There is no gimmick. The story is anything but short. I’d go as far as saying that 7 Star Dinosor Entertainment tells by showing and not showing, unlike a mainstream Hindi feature like Bheed. The themes might be identical, the empathy might be one, but what I’ll remember is an exhausted T-Rex trying to drink water from a pond. To put it in another way: No animals were harmed during this film. Only humans were.