Reviews/ Miss Lovely / The right grunge and grain

Films that try and capture murk and sleaze are usually hard to watch. Usually, there is a transfer of slime, and you feel like washing off the experience. Miss Lovely, Ashim Ahluwalia’s debut feature shows us the dark innards of the profitable porn-horror fringe-filmmaking that flourished in Bombay in the ’80s, the men who ran it, the women who had to run with it. It is done with an unsparing eye, without a hint of exploitation. It makes no excuses for any of its characters, but it does tell us where they are coming from. It has no distracting schmaltz, but a great deal of empathy. Ahluwalia gives us marvelous atmosphere, terrific detailing, just the right grunge and grain in the characters and an unexpected emotional punch: this is a film I want to embrace.
When we first come upon the Duggal brothers, Vicky (George) and Sonu (Siddiqui), they are in a face-off, a pattern that will repeat through the film. The older Vicky is the more entrenched one, who understands the rules of the very dodgy games they play: Sonu is trapped, and keeps wanting to break free, especially when he encounters the beautiful Pinky (Singh). Sonu has done something foolish in order to make some money, Vicky is furious, but is impelled to save his younger brother’s skin. Because blood is thicker than water. But for how long can this go on?
Siddiqui’s journey becomes ours, as he tries to side-step the tangles of this world of greedy businessmen whose depravity knows no limits, abandoned tin-sheds that become impromptu sets for “blue” films, lusty agents who think nothing of “live auditions”, married women in their mangalsutras who are happy to show off their moves, and the quiet desperation of young girls who have nowhere to go but down.
Ahluwalia doesn’t dot his Is or cross his Ts. There is no obvious plot, but very smart plotting. He expects you to do some of the lifting, and if you are game, you are in for the sort of cinematic experience that is rare in Indian cinema. In a couple of places I found some props (like a plump bikini clad female carrying a tape-recorder rather obviously) shouting out, “Look, look, we are the ’80s”. But in practically every other part of the film, the set design is impeccably understated. The camera too takes an authorial position here, noting not just the dazzling colours and the lights and shades, but also letting us look at other cameras recording the bump-and-grind on makeshift beds, being looked upon by men with sweaty palms and leery smiles.
Siddiqui’s tragic hero is the soul of this film, in turns mirroring the anguish and the dirt and the pain of Miss Lovely’s unlovely, squalid world. Anil George does an excellent job, as does Niharika Singh. As do the other bit parts that come and go.
This is a film that unsettled me, and moved me. This is also a film I will savour for a long time.

Om Dar-Ba-Dar/ Classic protest film

Director: Kamal Swaroop

Cast: Gopi Desai, Aditya Lakhia, Anita Kanwar, Lalit Tiwari, Lakshminarayan Shastri

I’ve just stepped out of Om-Dar-Ba-Dar, and I am gobsmacked all over again by this theatre most absurd. I’d seen it before, on TV screens and on laptops, but this digitally restored version by NFDC was my first big screen showing, and a renewed delight.
It’s hard to put Om- Dar-Ba-Dar in a box. You can see Kamal Swaroop ticking off his charter: put in corrosive anger against the system, cock a snook at tradition and superstition and religion and rites (the film is shot in Ajmer and Pushkar, and has pandas, and astrologists). Poke fun at ‘progress’, (or what passes for it), and advertising, and commerce. And what Holden Caulfield would have termed ‘phonies’. Om (Lakhia) lives with his father (Shastri) and sister (Desai), loves frogs, and likes to hold his breath for a long time. The sister has a boyfriend (Tiwari). There’s also a girl in dark glasses and no money (Kanwar), and a Lala who swallows all his diamonds and then seeds his ground with them.
I’m not sure whether Swaroop was aiming for consistent profundity in all these random characters doing random things. But in all the seemingly disconnected things, you can see the dots being joined in a wonderfully bizarre way, and the creation of a world in which tadpoles can be terrorists, and where, hallelujah, the status is not quo.
Om Dar-Ba-Dar is a classic protest film because it rebels against everything, with lines which perhaps sound wiser than they are, especially when you hear them again. One of my favourites is included in a “letter to the Prime Minister”, written by the father, former government servant, now astrologer: “Please ban googly in cricket and life in general”. Amen.
Welcome to the trippiest film made in Indian cinema.
shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com