Miss Lovely

a throwback to the days when love in the movies involved the mind as well as the heart. this film is such a truly unique mix of something that feels really old-fashioned (noir, classical love triangle, brotherly domestic drama) and yet extremely visionary and modern, almost postmodern. unique filmmaking from a director to watch.. i saw it at the Sitges festival in Spain. this forms an interesting double bill with a film i also recently saw - Peter Strikland's Berberian Sound Studio, set in the heyday of 1970s Italian horror cinema - although miss lovely makes berberian look like lite family entertainment in comparison!

In terms of comparisons - almost everyone has been invoked to try and describe miss lovely - PT Anderson (no, it's not boogie nights), twitchfilm even mentions that miss lovely is reminiscent of The Day of the Locust (perhaps - more the novel than the film), and mentions Brian de Palma. not quite. I've seen comparisons with Dario Argento, Von Stroheim.. What's interesting is that it's almost impossible to compare this movie with anything else in cinema - that's what makes it so unique and electrifying for me personally. It's just wholly individual and special. recommended!

Miss Lovely will generally upset many people - for the simple reason that it sets up lots of genres/ premises - and unsuspectingly dumps them to move onto something entirely unexpected. As others have written, this is NOT the Indian boogie nights or whatever was imagined of it - it is, in essence, an experimental pulp film (if such a thing exists). This film is a deconstruction of genre (as i saw it anyway), and this becomes apparent when you see how it switches from noir/ thriller to romance film (part of the theme of the film itself) and takes documentary, porn, horror and musical in it's wide cinematic stride exploding/merging all of the above.

Clearly more than tell a straight story, director Ashim Ahluwalia is devoted to questioning, analyzing, critiquing and (at times) upsetting social & filmic conventions here.

Working outside of the 'Bollywood' industry, Ahluwalia explores a number of ideas rarely seen in Indian cinema: social outcasts as (tragically heroic) protagonists, uninhibited sexuality, changing roles of women in society and the critique of (or deconstruction of) social structures and assumptions. Sonu & Vicky Duggal clearly represent a new form of rebellion (they are clearly anti-state, anti-film industry, "criminal filmmakers" if you will), and therefore give domestic and international audiences a glimpse into lives that would otherwise likely escape cinematic exploration.

Having seen a fair amount of contemporary Indian cinema, Ahluwalia appears like one of the few true innovators within this nascent movement, and is - for this reason - one of its primary players, explaining interest from Cannes & Toronto.

Watched this at Cannes and early reviews were initially confused, almost dissuading me from checking it out and sometimes positioning it as a Boogie Nights style American film, other times describing it as Wong Kar Wai-like. IT IS NOT ANY OF THE ABOVE! It's expressionistic, strange, captivating, surreal, eccentric and one of the more beautifully designed movies in recent memory, specially if 1980s Asian pulp & auteur cinema appeals to you as it does me. Its fragmentary plot is uncompromising, yet deeply rewarding as a complex genre movie makes way for a much more poetic take on what it means to be trapped in a claustrophobic economic/ social world with no way out. Feels like a marriage between von sternberg and andrei zulawski (kind of)..def art house, though. The narrative is just straight enough to follow whilst being daring enough to baffle - many feel that the character of Pinky, the dream-girl that drives much of the film is too opaque, but for me she felt just right - a kind of mona lisa of the bombay underground. highly worth checking out.

Miss Lovely is not an easy movie. It's not a movie that will ever play at a hundred mutiplexes and draw large popcorn eating crowds. But it's a fantastic movie, a sweaty, fever-dream of a movie, and it's wonderful that people are engaging with it. There is simply nothing like it in Hindi cinema - and like it or not, that is one thing I'm sure no one can argue with.

Miss Lovely doesn't offer anything like a straight plot, and it has no real stars - save for the "discovery" of Nawaz Siddiqui (this film was his first lead role). He's great in it, as is another "discovery" Anil George (who plays the demanding elder brother with an intensity unseen before in Hindi cinema). For me however, the film belongs to Niharika Singh, who plays the mysterious 'Pinky'. On one level, she is a femme fatale of yore (like in a 1950's Noir film), on another she's a complete cipher, a blank slate. You can project anything you want on her and she absorbs it. This could be seen as insignificant characterization, but I saw it simply as a struggling character who exists in the shadows of the film industry, someone you know almost nothing about but around which most of the plot revolves - like an empty center. Her mix of coyness, intensity, disinterest, coldness & warmth is terrific and incredible subtle.

That said, this is one of my favorite films of the year so far, and I'm glad to see this kind of edgy, fearless filmmaking coming from India.

Bollywood very proudly flaunts badges like mindless entertainment, leave your brains behind comedy, potboiler, masala entertainer etc. The award winning success of these films proves that there exists a larger population of people who step into the theater to consume these films and most of them find it real too.

This is a master piece. I call this new age cinema. Those who are getting bored of Yashraj and KJ movies, will definitely like Miss Lovely.

It would suffice to say that Miss Lovely is a film which is in a class of its own by such a far distance from its peers from the same house, that, by the sheer fact of its existence, it manages to add a chapter to the history of that very house.

The character building is magnificent, which lets one flow with the story without any jarring effects.The distinct flavour of each new element and the twists introduced thereby make it worth the trouble of tracking the complex plot.