‘The Real Superstar’: Why a French filmmaker is fascinated by Amitabh Bachchan’s screen persona

The Real Superstar is a cradle-to-the-present film about Amitabh Bachchan. But French filmmaker Cedric Dupire’s documentary doesn’t have biographical information or even an interview with the iconic actor.

Instead, The Real Superstar is an assemblage of clips from Bachchan’s movies. Not unlike a Rashid Rana collage painting composed from a multitude of photographs, Dupire’s chronicle cherry-picks scenes from Bachchan’s vast filmography to create a composite meditation on the actor’s screen image.

The result is an alternate cradle-to-the-present account, not of Bachchan the private citizen but of Bachchan the fictional hero. Dupire and co-editor Charlotte Touress borrow freely from across Bachchan starrers to find the clips that suit their own meta-narrative.

“My film isn’t about Bachchan’s real life but his destiny as a character,” the Paris-based Dupire told Scroll. “I imagined what would be the life of someone who is always changing roles. What must be going on in his head?”

The Real Superstar will be shown at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 18-23). The rivetting 69-minute documentary was previously shown at the 3 Continents Festival in Nantes in November 2023, during a Bachchan retrospective. Bachchan’s daughter, Shweta Bachchan, was among those who watched The Real Superstar at Nantes, Dupire said.

Dupire’s experiment in film semiotics begins with the assertion, “Within his body lives an army of heroes.” Starting from the 1970s, Bachchan appeared in a series of roles that portrayed the journey of the classic hero while also defining his persona: a much-awaited birth, a rough childhood, an anxious adulthood, the realisation of life’s true purpose that leads to messiah status, eventual victory or, at times, a glorious death.

The documentary is constructed like a typical Hindi movie, from the opening credits to the linear progression of events in the lives of so many fictional Bachchans. The formulaic devices include montages to show the passage of time, mirrors to depict self-doubt, and familiar lines of dialogue such as “Mubarak ho, beta hua hai!” (Congratulations, you have a son).

The re-assembly exercise draws attention to miraculous coincidences, recurrences and echoes. In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, a film character escapes the boundaries of fiction to enter the real world. This doesn’t happen in The Real Superstar, in which Bachchan’s angsty heroes appear to be caught in a time loop, doomed to repetition.

“I like the science fiction genre, in which someone is trapped in a world and cannot get out it,” Dupire explained. “I wanted to look at someone who goes through so many characters that he is lost in his own personality.”

The 45-year-old filmmaker’s unorthodox portraiture was not the result of personal fandom, but an attempt to understand Bachchan’s massive appeal – which began after Dupire met lookalikes of the actor.

Duprie made his documentary with Musafir (2005), about the musical traditions of Rajasthan. His films include We Don’t Care About Music Anyway... (2009) and Afghan Journal (2015).

The seed of The Real Superstar began to germinate several years ago, when Dupire, who is also a cinematographer, was in India, shooting a documentary on Hindi cinema.

“I shot with fans and duplicates, and I initially thought I would make the film about them,” Dupire said. “I met some of them, but I couldn’t see a film there. I then began thinking about a way to show something that unifies this country. I started watching a lot of Bachchan’s films to see what he represents.”

Through the lookalikes, Dupire realised the importance of doubling in Bachchan’s films: he is father as well as son, twins separated at birth, or two men who look exactly like one other. In the world beyond the screen, fans wanted to resemble Bachchan. In the films, Bachchan’s omniscience and omnipotence were solidified by casting him in multiple roles, Dupire found.

In 1983, while filming Manmohan Desai’s Coolie, Bachchan suffered a near-fatal injury. Even as Bachchan hovered between life and death, there were public displays of concern, from prayers to vigils.

“People dream through Bachchan, through his body,” Dupire observed. The Coolie accident was the moment when the line between Bachchan’s life and his movies was erased, when the actor’s reality mirrored that of his make-believe characters, Dupire pointed out.

The first film starring Bachchan that Dupire watched was Ramesh Sippy’s Western-influenced Sholay (1975). Although Dupire was not conversant with Hindi cinema initially, he gradually came to appreciate its distinctive storytelling modes.

“This kind of filmmaking is joyful,” Dupire observed. “There is space in the narrative to move away and then come back to the main story. There is something strong and free about the formula, it’s always surprising to me.”

Dupire added that there is no movie star in his home country who matches Bachchan’s popularity. “It is crazy how he can interpret so many heroic figures over such a long career,” Dupire said. “We don’t have such a character in France.”