Secret SuperstarMovie Review: Aamir Khan Has A Blast With This Diwali Release
Cast: Aamir Khan, Zaira Wasim, Meher Vij, Raj Arjun
Director: Advait Chandan
Genre: Drama
Rating: 3.5 stars
Insia is not a good student. She struggles with science as well as trigonometry, scores 30 out of 100 in a class test, and – despite this being the year of her board exams – the only time we see her textbooks actually being used in Secret Superstar is when they are stacked together to prop up her laptop so she can get the right angle to record YouTube videos. She is not a great sister, frequently fantasising about escaping her father and leaving her little brother behind. And, given the way she berates and mocks her mother, Insia doesn’t seem like the ideal daughter. She even snaps at the one boy who is nice to her at school.
Director: Advait Chandan
Genre: Drama
Rating: 3.5 stars
Insia is not a good student. She struggles with science as well as trigonometry, scores 30 out of 100 in a class test, and – despite this being the year of her board exams – the only time we see her textbooks actually being used in Secret Superstar is when they are stacked together to prop up her laptop so she can get the right angle to record YouTube videos. She is not a great sister, frequently fantasising about escaping her father and leaving her little brother behind. And, given the way she berates and mocks her mother, Insia doesn’t seem like the ideal daughter. She even snaps at the one boy who is nice to her at school.
It is these imperfections that make Advait Chandan’s Secret Superstarwork, even though it is a treacly and predictable underdog story. We do not usually see villainous parents in children’s films, yet here Insia’s father is a scoundrel, and the girl plots in order to free her mother from this tormented marriage. As she writes out a plan (number 29, her notebook tells us) this feels like The Parent Trap in reverse. Daughter and mother wish that the father is posted abroad so that he stays away for eleven months at a stretch. He might be back home 24 hours a day during the Ramzan period, but the two women decide they can bear him that long. It turns out they cannot – and should not – and Insia needs out.
She wants to fly away from this oppressive and dead-end Vadodara life using the videos, where she sings songs she’s written and plays guitar while wearing a burkha. These become an immediate viral sensation, and a newspaper clipping tells us that her first video has “double the hits of Yo Yo Money Singh.” Soon, a Bollywood music director called Shakti Kumaarr comes calling, and Insia groans. “Couldn’t AR Rahman have emailed instead?”, she grumbles, immediately entitled by online success, and finding herself stuck with an obnoxious jackass who – as her mother says – composes songs that sound like remixes of songs that never existed. This is the ultimate dismissal, certainly, but also an insightful one.
She wants to fly away from this oppressive and dead-end Vadodara life using the videos, where she sings songs she’s written and plays guitar while wearing a burkha. These become an immediate viral sensation, and a newspaper clipping tells us that her first video has “double the hits of Yo Yo Money Singh.” Soon, a Bollywood music director called Shakti Kumaarr comes calling, and Insia groans. “Couldn’t AR Rahman have emailed instead?”, she grumbles, immediately entitled by online success, and finding herself stuck with an obnoxious jackass who – as her mother says – composes songs that sound like remixes of songs that never existed. This is the ultimate dismissal, certainly, but also an insightful one.
