[Movie] My Take On Lucky Baskhar.

I had to rewatch this one because I wonder how he was damn so lucky, hehe, because everything about Baskhar's story just kept working out in ways that felt almost too smooth for a man who started out this broke and this stuck.

Baskhar is an ordinary bank teller, barely making ends meet, trapped with a loan he took to survive, a paltry salary that has not advanced a bit in the past few years, a family that relies on him, his wife, his little boy and his father who's paralyzed and has lost the ability to talk since years ago, when he was scammed out of everything, so that's already a guy with a load that a lot of people could not carry, then, when he's about to get promoted, he does but it doesn't go to him, yea, it gets handed to someone else, that humiliation is the caster, as right after that he begins to steal money from the bank just to survive and this one decision is what gets him into a much bigger world that he had never thought of entering, smuggling of connections, stock market manipulation, and finally full fledged money laundering, with a real backdrop of the big stock market scam era of 1992 in India.

What really got me to re watch it is that the ascension of Baskhar seems to be a series of calculations in most scenes, and a man that just kept landing on his feet at the right moments in others, each time he took a chance, he could have fallen apart and yet it was a benefit, That's the "lucky" part that prompted me to go back and watch it again, seeing if I missed something the first time, is it really just luck, or was Baskhar actually smarter and more calculated than the movie's first viewing? I mean, the second time I watched it, I began to see how many of his moves he made with such a sense of purpose, but they seemed to be a stroke of luck because he pulls them off so easily and so casually.

The movie also has this charm, because he constantly tells us that he was being interrogated by the CBI officials years later and he was breaking the fourth wall to narrate his own story, which means that he is basically letting us in on the joke the whole time, this self awareness of how crazy his story is, even to himself.

Dulquer Salmaan really has everything going for him in this movie, that's the combination of charm and desperation he brings to it and making Baskhar liked despite doing some of the shadiest things in the movie is hard to do otherwise without the audience turning on the guy.

The fact that I watched it again and realized it was this savvy, mostly silent math that ended up being such a stroke of genius the first time around is why it paid off for me. Baskhar didn't just get lucky, he was in a longer game than he realized that's exactly why this movie holds up on a second watch.

_IMDB