Although it's home to one of the most dynamic, diverse and (thanks to the Desi diaspora) popular film undustries in the world, India's Bollywood scene is still a shadowy world with internecine feuding, shadowy financing, and ties to organized crime, banditry and even terrorism that puts the dirty deals behind Hollywood blockbusters to shame. Liz Mermin's highly engaging documentary Shot in Bombay not only sheds a light on the often bizarre world of Bollywood filmmaking and its ties to real-world crime, but does so with a cleverly metafictional structure that echoes the multiple layers of coincidence and concurrence that make it all so alien.
At the heart of Shot in Bombay is Bollywood legend Sanjay Dutt, who's been harried for over a decade by the Indian authorities for his alleged connection to a series of bombings in Mumbai with murky ties to both organized crime and terror. It follows his struggles with the law, but it also follows his professional career as he stars as a cop in an action thriller called Shootout at Lokhandwala, based on a real incident where five wanted criminals were gunned down by the police. By no means incidental to the labyrinthine story (it's no coincidence that Shootout's director, Apoorva Lakhia, fancies himself the Indian Quentin Tarantino, as Mermin's narrative sprawls out into Tarantinoesque complexity) is the fact that the cop portrayed by Dutt in the film later became tangentially involved in the police investigation of Dutt.
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