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Film: Miss LovelyStarring: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Niharika Singh
Director: Ashim Ahluwalia
Producer: Shumona Goel
Banner: Eagle Movies,Ad Vitam (France)
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To aesthetically capture the scummy on
screen in all their naked glory is not an easy task. Debutant director
Ashim Ahluwalia has achieved a stirring and disturbing synthesis of a
documentary-styled narrative on the not-defunct world of horror-porn
from the 1980s, and a conventional Hindi film love triangle (two
brothers, one girl, tension, tension!).
The storytelling is not just unique, it
is also extremely disturbing. The characters do not follow the
redemptive path from sleaze to atonement. They remain till the end
damned, doomed and despicable in their greed to capture female flesh in
lascivious close-ups.
The lure of the leer is laid out with a brutal directness. The tale is a trap for the compromised. But it's not a morality tale.
The camera space between the characters
and the audience is next to non-existent in Ahluwalia's narrative. And
that's the highest compliment one can pay the film's cinematographer
K.U. Mohanan and co-editors Paresh Kamdar and Ahluwalia who have done
their jobs so well they seem non-existent in the scheme of Ahluwalia's
scathing sting operation on human depravity and uncontrollable sexual
appetites.
There is an unevenness about the
narration which perfectly matches the smoky seedy mood of the story.
Barring Niharika Singh's character which epitomizes beauty in the sleazy
cesspool, all the actors are captured in grotesque flabby close-ups.
Niharika looks aloof and detached from the sleaze. She seems to be
playing the title role. But then, deception is the name of the grime.
There is nothing pretty or lovely about
"Miss Lovely". Penetrating into the horrifically immoral world of
horror-porn films in the 1980s, Ahluwalia expends no shame in exposing
the characters - the low-life money-spinners desperate to make a fast
buck by shooting a fast f**k in hazy garish light.
Scene after scene of cheesy titillation
is piled on with little space for narrative niceties. In one sequence, a
desperately ambitious starlet is introduced by her mother to a room
filled with balding horny businessmen.
"My daughter is willing to do anything you'd like," the mother offers helpfully.
Elsewhere a flabby woman, clearly past
her prime, jiggles her bust for a midget- middleman in the hope of
getting a role as the middleman orders her to give him a closer look.
Clearly Ahluwalia knows this dark
desperate ugly world. He enters it fearlessly and shamelessly. The
narrative pulls the characters out of their cheesy lair like cavities
from a mouth filled with infected teeth. Emotionally and visually the
narrative remains married to the murky until the bitter shocking end.
The finale leaves us as sick in the pit
of our stomach as the rest of the film . These are characters who belong
to the armpit of humanity. You can almost smell their dried sweat. The
actors are so real you wonder if they are really actors! The four
principal parts are played with disconcerting scruplousness by Niharika
Singh, Anil George, Zeena Bhatia and last but not the 'leashed'
Nawazuddin Siddiqui who continues to create compelling characters culled
from dark desperate corners of the human condition.
Nawazuddin's Sonu Duggal is a curiously
untarnished soul trapped in a world of unmitigated debauchery. His
romance with the wannabe starlet Pinky (Niharika Singh) comes to an
expectantly sticky tragic end. The bitter rage with which Nawazuddin
confronts the betrayal of his innocent love for the girl is more
Shakespearean than you'd expect a film of this nature to be.
The blend of Ramsay and Shakespeare, of
the perversely potent and spiritually impotent, is unparalleled. Loath
or love it. But you've never seen anything like "Miss Lovely". It builds
a world of vicious vices with the raw stock of gritty stark visuals and
elemental emotions. The sound design is deliberately hazy, going as it
does from Asha Bhosle-R.D. Burman in the opening credits to incidental
distant sounds of girls giggling in fake ecstasy and moaning in ersatz
pleasure.
If we close our eyes we can "see" Ashim
Ahluwalia's world for what it is: a blind alley infested with a
cornucopia of debasement. Dark, sinister, sexy, dangerous and
devastatingly lurid, the sleazy world of Bollywood's semi-porn
scare-fests in the 1980s is recreated in a scarily new cinematic
language.
"Miss Lovely" takes Indian cinema to
another level. The view may not be pretty but it is unfailingly
provocative and exhilarating. This film is not for the squeamish.
