Reliving golden era of films!!. Review on Jubilee

Bombay Film industry or Bollywood as it is referred to now is part of most Indians' life since its inception. Vikramaditya Motwani's brilliant web series JUBILEE on Amazon Prime is set in Bombay( Lucknow and Karachi as well) in the late 1940s to early 1950s and makes a deadly amalgamation of real and reel which makes for an engrossing watch. The series is about a power couple who run the top Film studio and who need a new face whom they want to launch as their next hero Madan Kumar. This being the basic storyline of this series, Motwani along with Soumik Sen, writer Atul Sabharwal and the entire team takes the actual incidents of the film industry from 1936 to the late 1950s and transports into the golden age of Hindi films. The characters are heavily based on Himanshu Rai, Devika Rani, Ashok Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Prithviraj Kapoor and rather unknown actor Najm Ul Hasan. However, film buffs can easily see the insertion of Dilip Kumar, Kishore Kumar, Dev Anand, Nargis, Madhubala, Begum Akhtar, Guru Dutt, Shashidhar Mukherjee, Waheeda Rahman, Meena Kumari, Kamal Amrohi and even Shammi Kapoor in the characters. There is also real-life mention of K. Asif, Mehboob Khan, Radio Ceylon, cinemascope, playback singing, Russian interference and obvious twisted reference to Bombay(Roy) talkies. The real incidents interlaced with fiction and the mixing of characters is nothing less than genius. The art direction, setting, and props are top notch and one feels inside that era. The performances by Aparshakti, Sidhant Gupta, Aditi, Wamiqa and Ram Kapoor are superb. It is good to see veteran actor Arun Govil back in form after a long. However, my personal fav will be the amazing portrayal by Bengali superstar Prosenjeet, he literally nails it. The music by Amit Trivedi does full justice to the era. We have seen popular Hindi films like Guddi, Rangeela, The Dirty Picture and some forgotten docu dramas like Film Hi Film and Cinema Cinema on the film industry. However, Motwane and his team make full use of the web series format to make a very compelling watch, which revives the magic of black-and-white films for modern-day viewers.