REVIEW: Mirch

NOT HOT ENOUGH

"Mazaa to tab hai jab rules bazaar ke ho aur khel tumhaara," says frustrated wannabe filmmaker Manav (Arunoday Singh) to his girlfriend Ruchi (Shahana Goswami). And that's exactly the game writer-director Vinay Shukla has set out to play with Mirch. Manav is his alter-ego -- far to obvious and in-your-face, one might add. Shukla, despite the critical acclaim and reasonable commercial success of his debut film Godmother (1999), has struggled to stay afloat in the film industry thereafter.

His angst pours onto the screen throughout the narrative -- "Kitne produceron mein script sense hai?" Manav asks bitterly. He's not wrong -- just that he's living in the wrong times, and perhaps, as his girlfriend rightly points out, thinks himself above the rest (at least the filmmaker is candid about his own ego). Surrounded by posters and books of Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Bergman and Scorsese, he hopes to peddle his ideas to hardcore Bollywood producers who want to know what the selling point of the film is, whether it has sex or love, how many songs and so on.

And so Manav starts spinning subversive yarns dipping into mythological sources like the Panchatantra to the delight of skeptical producer Nitin (Sushant Singh). The first two stories are thoroughly amusing. Both are about lust and the deceit of foolish men by their superior, conniving wives who guiltlessly resort to foul means in order to achieve the sexual fulfillment their husbands are clearly ill-equipped to provide.

Kudos to Shukla for even addressing the question of women's sexuality and their need for happiness in a social order that's stacked so heavily against them. Raima Sen (looking gorgeous as ever) and Konkona Sen Sharma play the two women, while Rajpal Yadav and Prem Chopra are the gullible husbands. The author of course transplants himself in all the stories.

It's in the second half that the film fails to hold attention, because the stories narrated by Manav are now set in contemporary times and seem contrived, if still in keeping with the theme. Here too, Sen and Sen Sharma play the two women, while Shreyas Talpade and Boman Irani (hilarious as a caricature Sindhi businessman) are the husbands. The fifth story, which is meant to hold the narrative of the script within the film together and indeed of the film itself, is the least effective of all.

Add to that the problem that Shukla is a better story-teller than filmmaker (or that he didn't have enough money to make the film more cinematic), Mirch ends up looking like a telefilm with no distinctive 'filmic' qualities. 

Now we can lament the lack of budgets for smaller filmmakers. But the bottom-line is, if you have to be subversive, then you have to be able to challenge the system on its own turf and still come up trumps. 

Sadly, Shukla's Mirch attempts that and fails.