REVIEW: Not A Love Story

ALL LUST, NO PASSION

Ram Gopal Varma is a predator. Has always been. What started with the transformation of Urmila Matondkar into a sex symbol has now scaled new heights of debasement with the camera incessantly leering up and down Mahie Gill's skimpy clothing in Not A Love Story. Sure, we understand, the idea is to highlight the fact that this film is about a crime of passion (if you have to qualify a cold-blooded, if unpremeditated murder thus), but Varma's insight begins and ends with the protagonist's sexuality.

Deepak Dobriyal & Mahie Gill in the latest film from Ram Gopal Varma

As if you hadn't already got the picture about the how's and when's of the sensational Neeraj Grover murder in 2008 from endless news coverage, Varma replays the entire sequence of events, without adding an iota of wisdom or analysis. That wasn't his idea in the first place, one imagines. Here was a henious act involving a starlet, her obsessive boyfriend and a young television executive. Enough fodder for a film about naked ambition, uncontrolled lust, senseless murder and a botched if audacious attempt to cover it all up.

But what was going through Maria Susairaj's mind when she saw her boyfriend's face as she opened the door that fateful morning? And what when she saw him stab Grover repeatedly? And when Grover's body was lying in a pool of blood in her cramped flat? And then when she and Jerome allegedly had sex not far from where Grover was lying dead, and proceeded to stuff his remains in polythene bags and disposing them off? Or then, when she went about her days following the murder trying to act normal and get on with her life...?

Varma's film doesn't explore any of these questions. Maria a.k.a Anusha (Mahie Gill who perhaps thought this would be her next big ticket after Dev D) is reduced to a pathetic goldfish-in-glass-bowl metaphor (how literal!) and shown going to desperate lengths to become an actress. The walls of her flat are adorned with cheap posters of movie stars. Her boyfriend Jerome, a.k.a Robin (Deepak Dobriyal struggling with a horrible caricature) is obsessed with her (body, one presumes, for this film has no heart) and although she claims to love him, her real goal in life is to make it in the movies. 

Neeraj a.k.a Ashish (Ajay Gehi) is just as sketchily drawn as the other two, so while it's shocking to see him lying naked in a pool of blood or imagine Robin hacking him into small pieces (the scene is off-camera, although the sound effects make it impossible to not recreate the images in your head—in fact Sandeep Chowta's background score is possibly the worst ever in a Hindi film not made by the Ramsay brothers), it's difficult to get any closer to understanding the man than from reading newspaper reports. 

The question that remains unanswered at the end of Not A Love Story is, why on earth did Varma make this soft-porn film, if not to satisfy his own predatory instincts and titillate the audience in the process? Thank heavens, therefore, that he was unable to swoop down on the 26/11 terror attacks, for the sheer horror of what he'd have done with it is enough to send shivers down your spine.