 "Unmanly man, hazy film")
However, certain types of elitist, high-brow films can be criticism-resistant too. Take abstract, anti-narrative movies, where the primary intention is not to tell a story but to establish a mood, to provide a sense of a milieu, a lifestyle or a state of mind. Like anything else, such a film can be well done or poorly done. But once it has been canonised in critical circles, just try suggesting that a scene meanders purposelessly or that a shot is held for too long or seems self-conscious. In the Indian context, this happened recently during online discussions about the acclaimed Ship of Theseus, where if someone dared say (for instance) that a static shot of a character helping his grandmother with a bedpan in a hospital room could have been a couple of minutes shorter, he would be told “Well, that was the whole point.”
But of course, such criticism doesn’t have to stem from an anti-intellectual position. Taste, sensibility, or even the mood you’re in when you see a film, all play a part. Here is a director talking, in an interview, about why he got so bored with another director’s work: “He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, ‘Well, he’s not going to carry that woman all the way up that road.’ But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she’s gone.”
Thus spake Orson Welles, of Michelangelo Antonioni.
These things were on my mind as I processed my conflicting feelings about Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely. There are many good things in this avant-garde film, and I’m glad it finally got a commercial release after doing the rounds at film festivals for a couple of years. But I also found my attention wandering at times, and felt that the deliberate slowness of pace worked against the film — getting in the way of our understanding, or caring about, the central character.
This character is Sonu Duggal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the younger and more introspective of two brothers who make C-grade horror-sexploitation films for the underground video market in the late 1980s. A clear contrast is set up between the brothers. At one point we see a soft-core sex scene being shot, and a bosomy starlet, writhing on a bed in bridal wear, is being given directions: “Tera mard na-mard hai”. The premise is that her husband is impotent, so she is being groped and necked instead by a scaly-headed monster. But this divide between a na-mard (which can be shorthand for a passive, “effeminate” man) and a hyper-masculine bully is also at the heart of Miss Lovely’s own plot. Sonu — our point of entry into the story — is effete and dreamy-eyed, and seems to want to break away from this world; his brother Vicky is a ruffian who mockingly says “Bada mard bannta hai”.
This film doesn’t over-explain its milieu, instead letting the visuals, the art direction and the sound design do most of the work. Much of it is shot in the style of a handheld-camera documentary, there are relatively few outdoor scenes, the main impression is of oppressive interiors, rooms that are dimly lit and overcrowded, characters who are almost brushing up against the camera. It is an effective period movie (a reminder that the late 80s were a time of transition, in India’s metropolises at least, and in the entertainment industry), a bleak cautionary tale about show-business, and a character study: what happens when a man given to philosophising and dreaming finds himself born to the manor of a coarse, cut-throat world like this one? And yet, for all these qualities, the protagonist remains a cipher, just as hazy to us as the world he moves through is to him.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer