All right, class; raise your hand if you read Archie comic books as a kid.
Seriously? I didn’t expect to see so many hands from twenty- and thirty-somethings!
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| Betty (Khushi Kapoor) is madly in love with Archie (Agastya Nanda), but he's torn between her and richest-girl-in-town Veronica. Which will he choose? |
Or that such a film would be so much fun.
Director Zoya Akhtar’s charmingly retro Indian musical will be adored by everybody who made television’s Glee a monster hit for so many years. Everything about Akhtar’s film is note perfect for its early 1960s setting: Suzanne Caplan Merwanji’s small-town production design; Poornamrita Singh’s colorful, old-school costumes — researched via the archives of Vogue, Esquire, Sears and other period magazines and catalogues — that precisely suit each character; and a roster of young talent that totally sells this throwback concept.
I had flashbacks to the playfully energetic atmosphere that characterized Depression-era musicals, when Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland said, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!”
Akhtar does indeed put on a show.
The note-faithful replication of this comic book universe owes its authenticity to the script by Akhtar, Farhan Akhtar and Ayesha DeVitre, working in full cooperation with Archie Comics Publications. (Pre-credits artwork proves as much.)
The setting is the fictional Anglo-Indian hill station town of Riverdale (apparently located in a part of India that hasn’t been discovered until now). It’s a bucolic community laden with small, family-owned shops, where everybody knows each other.
Riverdale’s founding, explained during a brief prologue told via animated rod puppets, took place after Indian independence. The residents celebrated their new freedoms by planting trees in the names of their children; over the years this space — christened Green Park — became the much-loved center of town.
This information dump, during a prologue, comes fast and furious: almost too quickly to read all the subtitles while trying to absorb the artwork. But don’t panic; the subtitles are easier to follow once past this prologue, in great part because everybody slides back and forth between Hindi and English, sometimes within a single sentence. Well over half the movie is in English.
