Dir.
Anurag Basu , India, 2007, 131 mins, (English and Hindi with
subtitles)
Cast: Shilpa Shetty, Kay Kay Menon, Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sharma
Review by Carol Allen
As the final print of this film was only
ready hours before the press show and the preview version
I saw still had an incomplete sound track and some subtitles
missing - omissions which have presumably now been rectified
- it is tempting to believe that the film has been rushed
out to capitalise on the publicity Shetty has received from
her "Big Brother" appearances and increase her
profile in the UK . As however it's also due for release
this week in Australia, the Netherlands and other parts of
the world as well as in its native India, this may not be
the case. It does however demonstrate that Shetty is not
only a very beautiful woman but a good actress, who knows
her craft.
The style of the movie is an interesting mixture of contemporary
and Bollywood. There are plenty of songs supplied by an onscreen
rock band, who pop up rather irritatingly all over the place,
though there are none of the extended dance sequences that
are part of the Bollywood tradition. And the theme is the
modern one of how difficult relationships are in a 21st urban
environment, in this case Mumbai. Everyone in the film is
looking for love.
Shetty plays bored housewife Shikha, unhappily married to
handsome control freak Ranjeet (Menon), who is conducting
a clandestine affair with Neha (Kanga Ranaut), best friend
of her younger sister Shruti ((Sharma). Shruti is on the
dating scene, where she meets the rather nerdy Debu (Khan),
who has more to him than at first appears. There's a rather
sweet subplot concerning Shikha's elderly aunt (Nafisa Ali).
being reunited with the love of her youth (Dharmendra) and
another, lifted almost wholesale from the Billy Wilder classic "The
Apartment", in which ambitious Rahul (Sharman Joshi)
lets his apartment by the hour to his boss Ranjet for his
assignations with Neha, with whom Rahul himself is in love.
And there's also Akash (Shiney Ahuha) the handsome stranger
Shikha meets, with whom she's tempted to have a love affair.
The connections between all the characters are satisfying
in the way of such multi strand films and the actors are
all very good, particularly Khan, who demonstrated his versatility
recently in "The Namesake". The film itself though
is somewhat slight and overlong for its subject matter with
an awful lot of montages of the characters looking soulful
with that itinerant music group playing in the background.
The title sequence for example, which establishes them all,
goes on for some twenty minutes. And although it's a story
about the pressures of city life, apart from a couple of
traffic jams, you get very little feeling of the pace of
the city itself. It does however throw some interesting light
for Westerners on contemporary Indian culture, such as the
use of English phrases amongst the Hindi, in the way educated
English and Russians used to use French in the 19th Century,
and the women's clothes, which are a mixture of contemporary
and traditional. Most interestingly, while the young women
do have careers, there appears to be little conflict between
traditional and contemporary values and virginity and marital
fidelity still appear to be matters to be considered far
more seriously than in the West. Erotically it's clean as
a whistle. Sex is always something that's just happened or
might be about to happen off screen and being Indian there
is of course no kissing. "Sex and the City" without
the sex and indeed without the Manolo Blahnik shoes.
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