/> Starring Kunal Khemu, Tulip Joshi, Aushima Sawhney, Reema Lagoo, Sharat Saxena, Darshan Jariwala
Directed by Rohit Jugraj
Rating: ***

It's not often that you come away from a film thinking...oh hell, this one is far better than I thought!

Original fresh vibrant tongue-in-cheek and yet moving in its sincerity this big-little film acquires its power and energy purely from its maker's ability to infuse potentially hammy situations with a bristling believability.

You've seen film's about doppelganger-transference where lookalikes cross the line into each other's realm of vision to exchange lives.

The Prince & The Pauper did it long before Raja Aur Runk and Duplicate. Most films about double roles simplify the moral lines to the extent that Ram and Shyam become figures on either side if the coin. Flip-flop!

Rohit Jugraj (who earlier film James never prepared us for what Superstar brings to the fore) tosses that ram-sham coin into the air and lets it fall languorously and neatly to the ground.

That he has set this feisty funny and exhilarating fable of the prince and the super-prince (forget the pauper) in the film industry, is a happy occurrence that gives the narrative a zest to make in-house jokes without tripping over on its own cleverness.

This would be as good a time as any to state that Kunal Khemu who plays the earnest junior artiste and the spoilt but still-decent producer's son who cannot value the gift of Bollywood like his more humble middle-ground doppelganger, is a revelation. He brings to the two characters more than just a surface dissimilarity.

Khemu doesn't try to make Kunal and Karan different from each others. Often—as in that critical pre-interval sequence when the plot takes a literal somersault—we see the two Khemus as the yin and yang, mirror-images looking into one another's soul with disarming transparency.

Not too many 20-something actors today can carry off the discomforting predicament of baring their soul through tight close-ups.

Khemu dares the unthinkable. Not too many actors have carried out the double-role tradition with such casual aplomb. Happily, the special effects bringing the two Khemus together are not all that's special in the narration.

Khemu has a director who also dares to dream the impossible. While keeping the narrative on a fun and frisky plane Rohit Jugraj brings in moral and ethical issues in the second-half when the junior-artiste is forced to replace the dude from the affluent producer's family.

Watch the sequence where the junior-artiste Kunal posing as the star Karan visits Kunal's grieving parents. The camera (Mahendra Shetty) microscopes the son's dilemma as he must pretend before his bereaved parents to be a stranger. The background score (Sanjay Choudhary) creates just a hint of melodrama before backing off.

Fully filmy? Yes, but not quite. Jugraj always leaves scope for subtleties.

There's a mildly stirring dimension of authenticity in Jugraj's narration, as though Ram Gopal Varma's Rangeela had suddenly and happily mated with Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om to produce a film that takes us beyond the expected in pursuit of a happiness that's got very little to do with celebrating the spirit of the double role.

At times the glam-quotient required to make Bollywood's dream factory look believable is overly sham. The affluent Khemu in the swimming-pool with various bikini-clad blondes looks just too much like whoosh-fulfilment.

Superstar represents the wry slightly-cynical view of the outsider peeping nervous enviously and uncertainly into the glitter and glory of the entertainment business. But the sense of wonderment is well-contained.

Neither the humble wannabe nor the privileged producer's son is portrayed with cynicism, so that when the personality-transference between the two occurs unexpectedly, we aren't looking at a morality-play but a Bollywood take on Bollywood with the conventions turned on their head.

Jugraj seeks constant references to Bollywood biggies from Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar (no further in the past, can't take the young audience that far behind) to Ayesh Jhulka in Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, to Salman Khan in Andaz Apna Apna.

The inhouse humour pervades the plot without overwhelming the basic layering of storytelling.

We watch the characters as spinoffs of Urmila Matondkar in Rangeela, Shah Rukh Khan in Om Shanti Om and Pinchoo Kapoor in Karz (Darshan Jariwala's take as the ruthlessly exploitative producer reminds you of Rishi Kapoor's manipulative manager in Karz).

But we're also looking at a world where artificiality is not just a way of life and death. It's also the only way to function.

Watch Superstar for Rohit Jugraj's fresh original take on Bollywood's dream factory, and Kunal Khemu's sincere and warm performance as the wannabe and the don't-wannabe who share more than just a passing affinity with the rams and the shams of showbiz.