REVIEW: Miss Lovely

THE REAL DIRTY PICTURE

There’s something disconcerting about Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely and it’s not just the grim environs in which his tale of C-movie lowlife is set. Locations more authentic one hasn’t seen in Hindi cinema — literally squeezing out every ounce of glamour from the city of dreams to expose its ugly underbelly — nor cinematography that employs deliberate tackiness to force the action in your face. K U Mohanan achieved a similar look in parts of Reema Kagti’s Talaash, especially the opening montage; only it was more tasteful and less disturbing than this audio-visual overload.

Of course there’s a point to it all. We’re talking of the shadowy porn-horror industry of the 1980s (the Ramsay brothers being its most ‘sophisticated’ exponents) and the desperation and depravation of those involved. But much of the film’s first half is spent in building this atmosphere and after a while the shoddiness hinders your involvement with the narrative, primarily because the story just doesn’t move.

Clearly Ahluwalia isn’t targeting the frontbenchers — it’s not in the least exploitative except in a depressing way — and if his intention was to shock multiplex audiences with a reality they’re far removed from (at one point the audio track mentions this disconnect in a radio broadcast) he needed to engage with them more immediately. For instance, I’d have liked to know about the lives of brothers Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and Vicky (Anil George) beyond making these quickies in dark, dingy rooms with peeling walls.

There’s no back-story to any character and when we do get a glimpse into Vicky’s other life, it’s inexplicably glossed over. The meat of the plot, Sonu’s doomed love affair with a struggling actress, Pinky (Niharika Singh), develops gradually and again, because we know so little about Pinky, it’s hard to empathise with her plight. The only one who strikes a chord is Poonam (Zeena Bhatia), an ageing actress not very different from Vidya Balan’s Silk towards the end of The Dirty Picture.The scene where she gets drunk at a party and is led home by Sonu reminds you of the most poignant moment in that film, as Silk runs from a porn movie shoot after a police raid and is revolted by her own reflection.

Still, after you’ve adjusted to the tackiness and applauded the production design, you can marvel at the brilliant casting, particularly of George as the creepy Vicky whom his younger brother is constantly trying to talk out of the sleaze business, but also minor characters like the midget producer who speaks with such bravado it’s funny and sad at once.

Last year’s Hollywood release Lovelace about Linda Lovelace and her sudden brush with fame after the 'success' of Deep Throat (1972) evocatively brought home the horrors of the pornography business. It’s a straightforward narrative about a young girl from a strict, loveless upbringing unwittingly drawn into a cycle of exploitation and domestic abuse by her sinister husband/pimp.

Miss Lovely, on the other hand, works only in parts because it tries too hard to ‘be’ the film, rather than expose its sordidness.