Every frame of Roy is well lit and shot (Himman Dhamija), with beautifully detailed production design that smacks of exquisite taste — whether in alcohol, cars or bikes — and good-looking people at their brooding best. Even the plot is way offbeat, so far away from anything we’ve seen Bollywood do. It’s about a filmmaker’s relationship with his muse and looks at the artist as a thief (who steals from the lives of others).
Yet, despite all its philosophical meanderings, a plot-less Roy is so lost in its own ramblings about life and silences that after a while, it becomes very difficult to stay engaged even if you want to like it for daring to be so different. It gradually gets on your nerves so that you go from “Wow! This is so fresh. Is this copied from somewhere?” to “This is so bad. Why wasn’t this just copied from somewhere?” by the interval. So you can imagine how much more frustrating Roy gets by the time it ends.
The audience stood up to applaud the fact that it was finally over. During a week when critics were subjected to 197 minutes of MSG, it’s a rare feat for a film to feel twice as long as the Baba trip.
Arjun Rampal tries hard to embrace the quirks of this character (who uses a typewriter these days, and the writer-director only types wearing his literal thinking hat), Ranbir Kapoor looks like he had a premonition of how the film was going to turn out, and Jacqueline tries to pass off an awkward accent as British.
With ponderings about shooting without a script and letting the location dictate the story and exchanges with a producer who believes that his project is doomed, Roy feels like an expensive meta experiment in trying to see if Bollywood A-listers would really sign up to do a film without a script if they are paid big bucks for it. They would.
But the more important question is, would the audience show up to watch this pretentious art film pretending to be a mainstream commercial film? Try paying them for it.