Rahul Desai
Set against the birth of independent India in the 1940s and 1950s, the 10-episode series marries archival vignettes with composite legends through a narrative cocktail of art, ambition, love and politics.
You sense the buzz of Motwane – a versatile creator – in the way his craft treads the thin line between showing and showing off.
The Binod Das story is informed by the real-world hunger of Aparshakti Khurana. The moral darkness of Binod is a good jolt, mostly because one imagines Khurana is more suited to play Jay Khanna
Having said that, Jubilee is undercut by its own tempered voice. For a show as handsome as this one, it’s strange that the thing it lacks is a sense of swag and joy.
All of which is to say that Jubilee learns from the mistakes of a misfire like Bombay Velvet (2015) only to make its own long-form mistakes. The inspiration comes from a pure space, but the reverence feels more calculated and less personal with every episode.
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As Vikramaditya Motwane's Jubilee releases on Amazon Prime Video, here's a watchlist of films that are love letters — some charming, some bittersweet — to the movie business