A beautiful portrayal of the Ugly!
Throw together a couple of dysfunctional characters for whom life is too much of a burden, and who are themselves a burden on life, and lo and behold, ere long you have the pot boiling over with their manic-depressive shenanigans. The movie is symptomatic of a lazy, tentative, confused desi generation with fancy tastes for booze, gadgets, and easy sex, which it can ill afford or well deserve
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So an ill fated, college sweetheart couple marries and brings an innocent girl, Kali, to life: a girl whom they cannot give a decent standard of living or education or upbringing. She stays in a one-room hovel where her mother drugs her each night so that she can get drunk with her abusive husband’s friend and dress up in obscene gowns for, and have sex with. Throw in a lecherous one-item-song-wonder-girl married to a director with a frightfully low libido, and you have the ingredients for a disaster waiting to happen complete. All the characters are perpetually drinking, deeply in debt, and having overarching ambitions that are beyond the pale of legal, honest means of livelihood, and certainly beyond their personal aptitudes.
Sick of her domestic abuse and a drink-sodden life with her college sweetheart, Rahul Bhat, the mother, Tejaswini Kolhapure, divorces him. The sole savior, though far from perfect, is the single-minded police chief Ronit Roy, who marries the estranged mother, as perhaps part of his unfinished agenda which he has been lugging around since college days. Having lost her to his rival in college, he pursues her and covets her only because he doesn’t like losing! He never touches her, and gives her no money, and keeps her like a prisoner in her new home. Frustrated, she contemplates suicide, but fails. As per the court decree, her ex-husband is allowed visitation rights to his daughter, Kali. On one such trip, he loses her because of his carelessness. The rest of the movie is about a weeklong chase to find the missing girl.
The police, cynical and taunting to begin with, starts taking the missing seriously only once it realizes it’s the police chief’s step daughter it is looking for.
The girl’s father and his adulterous friend, trying to prove a point to the rival of the mother’s affections, Ronit Roy, launch themselves in the dark, cavernous streets of ghetto Mumbai to locate the girl, but stumble and falter at every step. The father, a failed, aspiring actor, soon takes to crime as a desperate measure to locate his daughter.
It becomes a sad state indeed that everyone connected to the girl; parents, friends and family alike, seize upon her missing to settle their personal scores, and milch the girl’s stepfather or her grand parents for ransom money! No one really cares for the girl in this adult mind game of one-upmanship and personal gratification.
The lesson brought home is that people who are unfit to even look after themselves, have no business to bring an innocent life into this world and then desert her to be inevitably preyed upon by the scumbags of society and meet a gruesome end- for no fault of hers. She deserves better.
The movie is a gritty portrayal of the murky underbelly of our city life, all sparkly and glittery on the outside, but black and vile on the inside. It appears the edifice of our culture, society and progress stands tottering on a very fragile ecosystem founded on the pain and untold sufferings of the underdog and the unfortunate- mostly children- for it is children that are most vulnerable and easily preyed on.
The movie depresses, rightly so, but is gripping and holds your interest throughout, and I would recommend it for no other reason than as a caution to society to watch better over its young, the meek, the mute and the weak. It also serves as a wake up call for youngsters out there succumbing to irresponsible, self-indulgent choices in life, without having any idea what responsibility and accountability really mean.
Full marks for an unusual, true-to-life, and brutal entertainment.