The Fame Game is streaming on Netflix. Anamika Anand (Madhuri Dixit) is a Bollywood star. She has a perfect life. Or does she? Do her loving husband, two lovely children, well-staffed luxe house, and a high-profile film with one of her favourite co-stars, add up to less than the sum of her many glamorous parts? ‘The Fame Game’, Dixit’s first web series, opens with a glittering awards function where her character makes a starry appearance. And then she disappears. Where has she gone? And why did she go? Cops crawl around, much commotion ensues, conspiracy theories are afloat, and the mystery deepens.
The eight-part season one of ‘The Fame Game’ goes back and forth in time, as we get to know more about the people in Anamika’s life: spouse Nikhil More (Sanjay Kapoor) is a bankrupt producer, mother (Suhasini Mulay) likes to gamble with a stacked deck, son (Lakshvir Saran) has no idea who he is, and all daughter Amara wants is to be is her mother. ‘Woh Anamika Anand Banna Chahti Hai’. Superstar Manish Khanna (Manval Kaul) shares a complicated history with Anamika, and keeps ducking his demons, even as he tries circling back to her. Amongst the cops assigned to the case is a woman dealing with personal issues (Rajshri Deshpande), and who has no time for filmi shenanigans.
The trouble with this ‘Who Is Anamika? Where is She?’ game is that it is neither fresh enough, nor interesting enough to keep us with it. It is awash with tropes. The happy-on-surface star with a super ambitious mother, the husband who takes advantage of the golden goose, the troubled children who don’t quite know what they want: we’ve seen variations of these themes in countless films.
The temptation to backlight Madhuri Dixit to make her glow like a goddess, is irresistible. But she is such a good actress that all that display of perfection on screen shouldn’t have mattered; here she is constrained by the banal way she has been written. That’s the trouble with the writing overall, and it impacts the entire cast, which includes such talents as Mulay, Kapoor, Kaul, Deshpande and a clutch of newbies. And the so-called mystery is nothing of the sort: in the way certain characters are introduced, who appear to be random but are clearly not, we know how they might connect with the lady who has vanished. The plot develops holes, too: a death occurs mid-way, and it isn’t touched upon afterward. Hello?
A couple of sharply written scenes tell you how the whole thing could have been. How Anamika makes short shrift of a cocky younger actress gives us a glimpse of the steeliness within all that gorgeousness: you don’t get to be on top for three decades and more without developing strong self-preservation instincts. In another scene, Anamika skewers a seedy financier. How close are these things to real life? These are the kind of tantalising, teasing tendrils that I wanted more of: Dixit was always more than the dhak dhak girl, that unfortunate sobriquet which never left her, and here she shows how it is done.
So yes, fame is not everything it is cracked up to be, and yes, there are many ugly sides to it; the constant pressure to keep up a face in public and private can sap even the most beloved celebrities. Only in the final episode does the series look as if it will break out in an entirely unexpected direction. Even the shiniest lodestars have aspects that they are chary of sharing. Will the second season show us that face behind the face? With Madhuri Dixit around, that is the least we can expect.
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