Indian women show their infidelities in hit movie
Director Vinay Shukla gives women a chance to express their desires as he brings female sexuality and infidelity on the table with an unconventional adult fare that tastes spicy, tickles the funny bone but doesn’t undermine the inherent murk– why only women are expected to abide by the rules when physical communication is a two way process.
The joke is not on any gender but on the Bollywood producers whose wish list doesn’t go beyond star, sex and satire. Arunoday Singh plays Manav, a Bergman–inspired struggling scriptwriter whose brilliant script doesn’t have these aforesaid ingredients. His editor-girlfriend (Shahana Goswami) introduces him to a producer friend (Sushant Singh) who loves to flirt with her. As expected he also doesn’t find the brilliant script commercially viable for a multiplex audience. Pushed to the wall with demands like sex is as saleable as a star, Manav comes up with four tales of adultery where the women wriggle out of tricky situations because they have their wits about them. Somewhere, beneath it is also the tale of Shukla who has been out of work after the critically acclaimed “Godmother”, which failed to make any dent at the box office.
The first two are set in ancient times, times free of taboos while the rest are contemporary stories where morality plays a role…an interesting point of view which unfortunately doesn’t get a definitive shape. In all of them we have a lustful female character, who cheats on her husband and gets away with it. The first two work really well both in terms of humour and surprise value. The second one, where Konkona Sen Sharma plays a lustful wife to an aged Prem Chopra is the funniest of the lot with Ila Arun adding the rustic Rajasthani flavour to the tale where the woman literally gets on top!
Never crossing into the terrain of titillation, Shukla, a seasoned scriptwriter manages to sustain the humour till the end credits but the third story is rather jerky and the fourth is predictable. While the first two stories are free of the moral angle, in the contemporary ones when the script takes ‘you did this, so I am doing this’ route, it sabotages the fun quotient and Shukla doesn’t prepare us to bring logic along in the second half. Because if reasoning has a role, one can’t ignore that all his female characters have to put up with morons. They have no choice but to break free. Where is the confusion, which is a contemporary reality?
However, the stories ultimately gel well with the connecting story of Manav and the climax has the requisite punch. Raima Sen impresses both as the sharp-witted seductress from a Panchtantra tale and as a modern day lady who teaches her suspicious husband a lesson of the lifetime. She has got the nuances of the characters spot on. It is the performance of an actor who knows exactly what is expected of her. Something Konkana Sen Sharma fails to conjure up in the right measure.
Shreyas Talpade is up to the mark but Rajpal Yadav is stereotypical and Boman Irani hams big time. Arunoday’s physique works for him but he doesn’t have the acting chops to play four different characters. He is passable as the scriptwriter but goes totally out of sync as the painter. And eventually it is the weakness of the central character, something the producer in the film also harps on, that bogs down this ‘sinful’ idea. A little more restraint, a little less indulgence with self would have turned the tide for Shukla.
It might not be piquant consistently but if you have a taste for the unusual, this “Mirch” has sufficient fire to deserve a bite.
Posted by Nick Turner
Category: Celebrity Adultery News
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