Locations in Europe: Glasgow, Scotland and London.
Storyline
Director/Producer: Director, Ranjit M. Tiwari; Producer Vashu Bhagnani and Jacky Bhagnani
Line Producer/Executive Producer/Associate Producer: Sarwar Mohammed, Radhika Joshi, Navmeet Singh; Executive Producer: Mahipal Karan Rathore
Star(s): Akshaya Kumar, Vaani Kapoor, Lara Dutta, Huma Qureshi, Adil Hussain
Songs/Dance/Action: Located in Budapest, Hungary
Indian/ International Crew: Indian and International
Language: Hindi
Film Location Analysis
By Shikha Jhingan
The film shows Bell Bottom arriving in London to meet his brother and sister-in-law who have been blessed with a baby. The entire sequence has been shot in Glasgow, Scotland but made to stand for London.
An aerial shot introduces us to London, while the text reveals the date of Bell Bottom’s arrival as June 19, 1983. We see the protagonist and his family visiting a Gurudwara (a Sikh shrine) with the new born infant. Bell Bottom notices a suspicious looking man and starts following him but he slips away. Convinced that he could be one of hijackers, he comes to the Gurudwara the next day, where he spots the man again and follows him by hailing a taxi. To recreate London of the 1980s, the sequence has been filmed in Glasgow.
What follows is an extended trail, where our field of vision is directed towards the vehicles/taxis that were on the road in London during the 1980s, with the number plates also having a retro look.
To avoid showing other vehicles in the background, the sequence tries to create a frame with a frame: through the use of visual effects, the cars in the background are made to look hazy, so that they do not betray their contemporary look. The sequence thus selectively draws our attention to some specific part of the frame where a particular temporal order is being hyper visibilised.
As we enter into a neighborhood, we see a retro look of London (shot in Glasgow). Men and women are listening to sports commentary on the transistors and cheering for a team. As the two cars turn into a street, the moving camera shows us garage sales, men hanging out in street corners with dishevelled looks. This helps in recreating the period under Margaret Thatcher, when the state withdrew itself from the model of welfare economy leading to huge job losses and deprivation.
Bell Bottom follows the suspicious figure into a street where we see signs on shops that suggest that the area is inhabited by South Asians. Bell Bottom enters the building in pursuit of the shadowy figure by asking the score from some young men hanging around on the footpath. He enters the building and checks its exit doors. Sound of Hindi music from a corridor draws him towards the apartment of the hijackers. In the next scene we see Bell Bottom sitting in a café across the street having a coke. The camera gives us a view of the hijackers coming towards the window to get some air and then light a cigarette. Bell Bottom uses his camera to capture their faces. Interestingly, to mark out the hideout, our attention is drawn to the potted plants and red painted windows to distinguish it from the rest of the symmetrical façade. After identifying the terrorists and their location, Bell Bottom uses a red-colored phone booth to call his Boss in India.
The meeting of the team in a restaurant is shot through the glass allowing us to see the team merging with the glass surface that allows us to see the details of the street like signs of camera shops etc. In his brief to the team, Bell Bottom mentions that the area will be crowded as Indian team has entered the cricket world cup. Thus, the film tries to give spatial and temporal density to the location by bringing in the context of actual historical events of 1983 as Indian cricket team won the World Cup on 25th June, 1983. Next, we see the RAW team’s vehicle slowly moving into the neighbourhood, while the cricket commentary dominates the sound track. Inside the apartment, Bell Bottom catches traces of a Hindi film song being played in the wash room and finds one of the hijackers sitting on the toilet seat with a transistor in his hand.
The RAW agents conduct the operation in a swift move to capture the three hijackers while the key figure dressed in drag slips away.
Interestingly, through its visual style, production design, use of props and sound effects and editing, the sequence is fashioned to train the spectators to observe every aspect of the location, marking its distinctive visual, aural and sensory qualities just the way the RAW agents were taught in an earlier sequence of the film.
Additional Information and Links
The film was shot just when the covid restrictions lifted in August 2020 in Scotland.
Done With Glasgow, Akshay Kumar And Team Bell Bottom Begin Shooting In London (ndtv.com)
