Undertrial 69 aka UT 69 is the risque label handed out to beleaguered billionaire Raj Kundra playing himself, in a film based on the recent events in his life. Confused? Don’t be. If the central role in the bio-pic can be played by the person who it is based on, and that person happens to be an actor (a detail you can gather from his Wiki page), well, why not? The trouble with this two-hour-long tale is that instead of digging into details of the accusation—producing pornographic material- that lands Kundra in Mumbai’s Arthur Jail, where he has to stay for 63 days without bail, is that it is just one long litany of woes. From the time the clean-cut Kundra enters a large, empty quarantine cell where he is the only inmate, to an inhumanly crowded pen where hundreds of undertrials are forced to live in terrible, unsanitary, unhygienic conditions, and undergoes everything in between- filthy toilets, barely edible food, regimented days and nights—all we see is the despair and moroseness which besets our man. The only break he gets is the occasional phone call to his wife, the actor Shilpa Shetty who is present as a disembodied voice on the phone, or swaying seductively on the TV screen. That’s when he breaks into a smile. That, and the rare chance when the undertrials are ‘allowed’ to celebrate (Ganapati time) when they can sing and dance, or the sequences when they swap life stories, or the warm moment when a birthday is celebrated with a makeshift ‘sonpapdi’ cake. Ultimately, there’s nothing new in any of it, other than the fact that despite the griminess and the grimness, all of it appears quite sanitised, the coarse brutality and the sexual exploitation barely hinted at. The only surprise is that Kundra himself appears quite relaxed on screen. Perhaps he does have a future in the movies. UT 69 movie cast: Raj Kundra UT 69 movie director: Shanawaz Ali UT 69 movie rating: One and a half stars
