When I heard about a film made by a Bombay-ite (a fellow Cathedralite to boot) about a hair salon in Bombay, I thought ’’what a wonderful idea.’’ As a child I used to wait for my mother as she had her hair done at her South Bombay hair salon staffed by ethnic Chinese hair dressers and often overheard the gossip and chatter that both the customers and the women who worked there thrived on. The South Bombay hair salon as a microcosm of urban Indian society, I thought.
Alas, this dreadful film is nothing but a narcissistic montage of close-ups of bland pretty people and their equally bland lives. Throw in some incest, cocaine use, psychobabble and you have a series of trite vignettes strung together by some horrible (and laugheable) performances and a gimmick that as a one trick pony would work only in Improv comedy. The main character, you see, can read the minds of his hapless customers as he cuts their tresses. Then he engages in a bit of minor God playing. As a skit on ’’Saturday Night Live’’ this would work; as an expose of the darker underbelly of Bombay high society it is leaden melodrama.
The most unfortunate aspect of this film is that in it’s hopeless attempt to make Bombay/Mumbai appear to be a cheezy version of what the screen writer thinks is Manhattan, the film forgets that there is a really interesting city OUTSIDE the really boring fantasia of the hair salon peopled by Prada wearing bores. Bose may think that if showing the West a film set in Bombay that doesn’t picture the proverbial Indian urban cow does modern India a service, then give me Bollywood with its over the top joie de vivre any day.