Back to his roots?

MARQUEE

. What is less well known is that he began the Hollywood leg of his career at a time when a certain sub-genre was gaining popularity within the broader soft-core field.

These were the B- and C-grade movies referred to as "women's prison flicks", the plots of which usually centred on falsely incarcerated young nymphets who would learn things about the big bad world during their stay in prison.

They would learn, for instance, that all wardens were sadistic lesbians with spanking fetishes and that the preferred communal method of bathing in women's jail was for inmates to rub each other down in hot tubs. (Shower scenes were optional, but they had to be well-lit, and shot with a smidgen of Vaseline on the camera lens.)

I watched some of these films between the age of 13 and 15 and they played an important role in my career as an appreciator of movies and lady wardens. Not being fully acquainted with Mr Mundhra's illustrious filmography, I'm uncertain whether he ever dabbled in this sub-genre himself "" but I figured he would at least have been influenced by them.

So imagine my joy on coming across an early scene in his latest, Provoked, where Kiranjit Ahluwalia (played by Aishwarya Rai) is callously ordered to "Strip!" within a few minutes of her entry into an English prison.

Ms Rai's pellucid eyes grow wide and her lips tremble, but as it happens this premise isn't taken much further; instead we get a quick cut to a freshly garbed Kiran being led to her cell. Since it was a shared cell, my inner 13-year-old was hoping for some brunette-on-brunette action, but this too was not to be, for Provoked has Mundhra in his carefully honed Serious Director avatar.

This is an earnest but laughably contrived film based (very, very loosely) on a true story: that of the real Ahluwalia, a London-based Punjabi housewife who killed her vicious husband after years of domestic abuse and ended up becoming an icon for battered women.

Now you might wag your finger sternly at me and say, "This is a profound tale about a serious issue and you shouldn't be making fun of it, you...you...insensitive

Y-CHROMOSOME!" But what to do, as a film buff and sometime critic my concern isn't with how well-intentioned or message-oriented a film is but with how it's executed. And seen in this light Provoked can be approved only on the grounds that it's a fine exercise in comedy.

For starters, everyone Kiranjit encounters is either a racist ogre or an angel of mercy. In the first half of the film everything about her spells Victim; the world is conspiring against her and we are helpfully given a series of cuecards that say, "This is where you feel sorry for poor Kiran."

In the second half, she is the Inspirational Heroine, the Surmounter of Odds, and now the cuecards are ordering us to cheer her on. Neither persona is believable, for this is a film that deals in caricatures and shortcuts.

It's prettified, manipulative, and only rarely does one get a sense of real people involved or real feelings at stake. When Kiranjit's boorish, one-dimensional husband pushes her down a flight of steps, it feels like, well, someone pushing a simpering Aishwarya Rai down a flight of stairs "" and face it, wouldn't you want to do that?

Okay, don't answer that question. Instead, let me wrap this column up with a "Moral of the story is" that's as pat as Provoked was: Inside every soft-porn director is a social evangelist waiting to come out. Or is it the other way round?

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)