Dec 15, 2015 04:37 PM
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Tell me seriously, when was the last time you saw a really good movie, or read a really nice book, from an Indian? See – that’s hard to recollect, isn’t it – it seems so long ago. We seem to have been sucked of all creativity, like a giant, intellectually challenged and defeated tumbler that is sparklingly empty and void after a brain freeze drinking competition. The muse in our country is as scarce as a box of dry matches in Chennai during the recent floods.
This then, is another sorry tale from the barren, infecund, frigid, sterile and impotent stables of Bollywood. Our moviemakers have got mixed up with what makes good news headline, and what makes good Sunday entertainment when man, woman, child troops into a hall balancing coke, popcorn, cellphone, 3D eyeglasses, ticket and hotdog in their hands; their eyes lit up with hope; their hearts thumping in anticipation of a day about to be well spent; and their faces aglow with the happiness that comes from making a sound financial decision of buying the Platinum Seats that set you back by a couple of thousands of the crinkly currency.
The Indian producers are awestruck with the idea of devising a clever story based on media flavors of the season, and mistakenly regard that as ‘being different, being inspired’. No sir, you’re not, you’re just a sad plagiarist, a terrible writer, an insipid storyteller and a criminal wasting the time and money of the Sunday merrymaker. You’ve no business to be peddling your wares in public – go make your social message documentaries and flaunt them all you want to your aunt.
Now, the(non-existing, fractured) plot: Frieda invites her friends to her Goa home to announce she’s getting married – to another girl. The girls – I counted till eight, and then lost tally – seize the opportunity of being locked in sylvan surroundings to drink, smoke, make gay love, and rave and rant – like angry Indian goddesses – on just about every clichéd thing that’s wrong in this country, such as land grabbing, wife bashing, Article 377, eve teasing, moral policing, revealing dresses and the inevitable rape. It’s a talk show, a ‘shout show’ rather, the Arnab Goswami kind, on atrocities on women in India.
Those of you who have been following the ongoing ‘Big Boss, ’ and have been intimidated by the screaming, quarrelling women there, take note that BB will seem like a meek, quiet, and serene event compared to the pandemonium that will be inflicted on you in this movie. If you found managing one woman to be a lifetime task, imagine listening to the constant babble of a gaggle of eight! There is not one male in the movie except Dhoni, the neighborhood mating bull who often strays into their living room trailing the scent of so much feminine heat.
The climax comes when the director realizes there is nothing more left to grouch about, and the girls have barely changed clothes, or stirred out of the darkled house, and it’s close to two hours already, so he gets one of them, the whitest and most skimpily dressed one obviously, drunk and raped on the beach. Another one of them – don’t bother which – decides to take the law into her own hands and shoot down the rapists like dogs. Lastly, the entire Christian congregation takes the blame for the killing, on of course, a purely moral high ground. I have no clue how the movie ends, though I swear I hung around till the credits scrolled past.
The message of the movie is that a woman in this country has to assume the avatar of an angry goddess to get respect.
Respect to the girl – Yo!
The scriptwriter has carefully scanned newspaper headlines since December last year when the national guilt was up in arms against the Nirbhaya-episode perpetrators, and picked up every cliché that he could encircle boldly with his felt-tipped quill, and tossed it into the smorgasbord. You need an IQ of over 200 to figure out the story – I sat through with the patience of Job just for the wonderful bitching I was going to get to do.
The constant, breathless whining, cursing, and yelling assails you without a moment’s pause or lull, like the whiplash of a whirlwind tornado, till you are ripped off your seats and chucked out into the washroom where you splash water on your face, and look for earplugs or aspirin or both, and prepare for another iteration of battle where you will again be at the receiving end, unless you dash out of the hall waving a white handkerchief over your head yelping, “I can’t take it any more – spare me.”
The women, with white blossoms in their hair and black thoughts in their heads, pattering in unshod feet in semi-darkness, seem to me badly-adjusted people, unfit for human or animal society. They pretend to be liberated, yet are so coy, they are oversexed, yet so frigid, so self-aware, yet so in self-denial, and clearheaded, yet so muddled – which is exactly what you will be after witnessing this spectacle.
The feminine grouch gives an accurate imitation of a mongrel with an ingrained toe. Her banter is largely made up of grunts. She carries a facial expression that scares little children on swings and takes all the starch out of corny young ladies. She seems perpetually to bear the imprints of the hoof-marks of a terrible nightmare.
This movie is exalted, and flawed, by what is almost a madness of metaphors, a dithyramb about a dithyramb. It would be difficult to think of a tower of babel jarring on a storey higher than this one.
If you thought this movie was about swinging lesbians – you are right. If you thought you were about to be let in on the fun – you are so damn wrong. The nearest you get to some corny fornication is a female succubus swinging suggestively, or pleasuring herself in her sleep. They do keep touching and grabbing in the dark, and one wonders when they will shed their clothes and start rubbing their semi-naked bodies with each other, but that, alas, never comes to pass.
One thing I liked about this movie – I was all alone in the hall and felt the movie was being screened only for me – for a minute I mistook myself for being a star reporter and critic – and not just some snoopy writer venting his ire on Mouthshut!
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