Zoya Akhtar's Luck by Chance has the most nuanced take on Bollywood's outsider vs insider debate

One of the biggest achievements of Luck by Chance is the way it depicts nepotism in the film industry, probably the only mainstream Hindi movie to do so. In another scene from the film, during the of launch Niki Walia, daughter of yesteryear superstar Nina Walia, Niki tells the media, “I never thought I’d become an actress. Niki Walia gets her launch handed to her on a platter, with superstar Zafar Khan even though she has no experience acting; she’s a bad actor, and can’t even perform her dialogues properly. The film is filled with contrasting ironies: when the film shows Nina Walia calling the shots for her daughter, demanding branded clothes and Louis Vuitton bags, when Sona has had to sleep with a producer for years, hoping to play “second lead” in a movie, Vikram has to find a grandfather clock just to get on a movie set, and Abhi has to do theatre night after night for an uncaring audience, all in the hope that they would land one movie, somehow. She shows his powerlessness too — the struggle to get an investor for a film without a big star, the pain as star-after-star rejects the role, and when he finally breaks down because Zafar won’t return his calls, and he feels disrespected and rejected, you realise how each individual in this system is just a cog-in-the-wheel, whether it is the successful producer or star kid, or struggling actor.