Arsenic and old lace

Bhardwaj first came into public consciousness with Maqbool,quickly followed by Omkara. Both films were brilliant and Indianised,retelling William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello. Tabu’s Nimmi in Maqbool is Lady Macbeth,whose beautiful shararas conceal her wily affair with ganglord Abbaji’s main sidekick,Maqbool (Irrfan Khan),and her bulging belly,as she is with child. Nimmi is the biggest villain in this story as is Lady Macbeth in hers,beauty with a purpose to destroy.

Kareena Kapoor’s Dolly-Desdemona is bereft of negativity; her only flaw is falling for the wrong man who ends up smothering her in a jealousy-induced misunderstanding. Her unfashionable salwar-kameezes cannot hide her unimaginable luminescence,unreal in the dust and grime of a small-town setting. She pays for her innocence with her life.

Bhardwaj’s newest offering,which the Renaissance man (as all newspapers refer to the filmmaker,writer,singer,lyricist,composer and sometime cricketer) has directed himself,is 7 Khoon Maaf where Priyanka Chopra plays the praying mantis. Susanna is a serial bride who turns murder into afterplay.

With each new husband,she ages some more. Her choice in clothing,more like her stylist’s,is in keeping with her status but also with the trends of the day. With an army officer husband,she plays the army wife to the T,saying decorous things,enjoying a drink with the men and tangoing with finesse in a shameless red dress. She exchanges her Equestrian trousers for jeans and a printed T-shirt when she has a rocker for a husband. The bangs,bangles and hoop earrings with a denim jacket are reminiscent of the disco ’80s.

With the Russian bigamist,she’s the socialite sophisti-cat in bug-eye sunglasses and a tailored white jacket. Her Darrling song has her wear a patina gold sari with European-style roses netted in its weaves and in her hair,like a baroque painting.

Her button-down sundress is undone up to her thighs when Annu Kapoor slips a shoe on her.

And each wedding dress is wow— lace and tulle and lots of glamour— even the conservative self-buttoned one she saves for the seventh husband is well-structured.

In one scene,she plays a Dickensian Miss Havisham,jaded and collage-ned on her rocking chair as her young Pip,the narrator of this film and a son-figure,returns. She removes her house robe to seduce him and reveals her bare and crinkled back.

True love didn’t exist for Priyanka’s Susanna,but boy,did she dress the part. namratanow@gmail.com