Movie! 122: The Archies.
Occasionally charming and with spectacular production numbers, but why is it so damned long?
While it’s always difficult to predict what kind of film Zoya Akhtar will make next (did you think she would pivot to the slums of Dharavi [Gully Boy] after a swanky cruise in the Mediterranean [Dil Dhadakne Do]?), certainly I did not think she would be at the helm of a musical comic-book movie. Yet here is The Archies, her 1960s-set adaptation of the Archie comics, rebranding Riverdale as a fictional Darjeeling-esque Indian hill station and all the characters as Anglo-Indians speaking a sometimes jarring mix of Hindi and English.
Perhaps one reason I was particularly surprised when this film was announced in 2022 was that Akhtar has previously (apart from her short film in Bombay Talkies) shown very little interest in the lives of children and teens. Even the college-age protagonists of Gully Boy were grappling with very adult issues – housing, money, jobs, social class, a conservative society. The seventeen-year-olds of The Archies are worlds away – Riverdale is described in the beginning as being ‘baadalon kay peechhay’, behind the clouds, quite literally in a sunny, happy neverland. These kids – and they are very much kids – live in beautifully done-up homes (the cute-as-a-button production design is by Akhtar regular Suzanne Caplan Merwanji) and have nary a care in the world beyond their own romantic interplay.
But, as Archie (Agastya Nanda) finds out in the showstopping number ‘Everything is Politics’, larger problems will always intrude on sunny little lives. It turns out that a certain Hiram Lodge (Alyy Khan) is bent on a series of evil redevelopment plans, which include building a hotel in Green Park, a landmark in Riverdale where a plant is planted every time a child is born. To complicate matters further, Lodge’s daughter is Veronica/Ronnie (Suhana Khan), Archie’s childhood sweetheart.
Archie’s other sweetheart, Betty Cooper (Khushi Kapoor), is also here, as are a string of supporting characters from the comics. In total, the primary cast of seven friends forms a rough group, all of whom have their own interpersonal dynamics and each of whom has a part to play in the resistance to the redevelopment.
Akhtar has previously spoken about how her love for the ensemble cast and for giving each character a satisfying arc inevitably lengthens her films, but never has that been baldly truer than in The Archies, which drags on for two hours and twenty-three minutes. It has no business being this long, considering that the characters struggle to make a serious impression. Perhaps it’s down to Akhtar having cast seven debutants (or six, considering Mihir Ahuja, competent as Jughead Jones, is already an established, if still not widely known, presence). The actors are all raw, which is only to be expected, but some of them stick better than the others. Khan and Nanda, in particular, bring charm and sparkle to Veronica and Archie, leaving poor Kapoor far behind. She alternates awkwardly between being unhelpfully reminiscent of her sister and stiff. Vedang Raina is suave and assured, but his character, Reggie Mantle (meant to be the group’s flirt), bends easily to the screenplay’s whims. One of the first times we meet him, he is belittling another member of the group, Dilton Doiley (Yuvraj Menda), who is clearly smitten with him. But in later scenes, without any actual reflection or motivation, he stands up for and is incredibly understanding of Dilton. Menda is spirited as Dilton, giving the nerdy character a lift. Rounding out the group is singer Dot. making her acting debut as part-time hairdresser Ethel Muggs. Dot.’s acting leaves much to be desired, but she makes a much stronger impression in the songs she has been invited to co-write, where her talents go up against the might of Javed Akhtar, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and Ankur Tewari. Unfortunately, her best song (and the only one she wrote alone), ‘Asymmetrical’, has been cut from the film.
The storyline these actors are handed to work with is flimsy at worst, diverting at best. But Akhtar is aiming in large parts of this film for the sixties style, and The Archies is very stylish throughout. The costumes (by Poornamrita Singh) are across-the-board tasteful and enviable, but the bigger achievement is the musical numbers. Each one is beautifully produced, choreographed and staged – it’s tough to pick a favourite, but maybe I’ll go with ‘Jab Tum Na Thee’, in which Archie and Veronica’s date is transformed into a ballet in the restaurant, with wise waiters singing words of warning to each of them. The lyric ‘Don’t you know that he’s just a flirt with a smile like dessert made for you?’ made me smile like dessert.
Despite the effort that has clearly gone into the making of this film, it’s plagued by characters who are inconsistent and therefore hard to identify. The end of the ‘Jab Tum Na Thee’ number, for instance, shows a hopeful Archie being rebuffed by a mocking Veronica. Why, then, does she take offence when he instantly runs to Betty for comfort? Archie himself, meanwhile, is brushed off as ‘confused’ for stringing two girls along at the same time. Later, their love triangle begins to be dangerously reminiscent of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Reggie’s opening scene has him making out in a car with an unnamed girl who never reappears, and his romantic arc is abandoned. Ethel declares, ‘I’m not going to be apologetic for my ambition!’ when she leaves the town’s old-fashioned salon for the newfangled one across the street; but at the first authoritarian diktat from the laughably sinister owner of the new salon (Sheena Khalid), she goes scurrying back to her old job. These irregularities render the teens hollow.
In true Akhtar style, all the adults in the town are played by seasoned character actors and familiar faces – Luke Kenny, Satyajit Sharma, Tara Sharma, Koel Purie, Vinay Pathak, Suhaas Ahuja, Delnaaz Irani, and even Tom Alter’s son James Alter. Few of them have much to do, but it’s a pleasure to spot their faces in the cast. Other little nods to look out for include a throwaway reference to Ruskin Bond and a sneaky line about being a minority in India.
In the end, The Archies is undone by a running time that its unremarkable plot does not deserve and by characters who don’t really worm their way into your heart the way Akhtar hopes they will. It will be interesting to watch what all these bright new actors do in the years to come (particularly Nanda, Khan, Raina and Menda) and that’s perhaps the one memorable takeaway from this film.
The Archies is on Netflix.