Sleaze and the unmanly man - notes on Miss Lovely

At one point in Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely, a soft-core sex scene is being shot for a horror-titillation movie – the sort of C-grade movie that the Duggal brothers Vicky (Anil George) and Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) specialise in. A bosomy starlet, writhing on a bed in bridal wear, is being given directions – “Tera mard na-mard hai” (“Your husband is impotent”) – and we get a vague sense of what the scene is about: the woman on the bed has her eyes closed or turned away (in the manner expected of a good Indian bride), and so she doesn’t realise that she is being necked not by her husband but by a scaly-headed monster.

The film being shot is a cheesy, low-budget thing that might make the work of the Ramsays seem refined in comparison, and the monster looks more comical than scary. But the contrast between a na-mard (which can be shorthand for a passive, hence “effeminate” man) and a rapacious, hyper-masculine bully is also at the heart of Miss Lovely’s own plot. Of the movie-making Duggals, the younger brother Sonu – our point of entry into the film, because we are privy to his inner thoughts and personal stirrings – is effete and dreamy-eyed, and seems to want to break away from this world. Vicky, on the other hand, is a ruffian who mockingly says “Bada mard bannta hai” when his brother tries to strike out for himself. He is the real fiend here, more of a threat than the badly made up monster in that sex scene could ever be, and he is presented in menacing terms: in one scene in a darkened disco, there is a striking shot of him looking down from a height, a red light next to him blinking away as if to signal Danger.

The brothers will fall out over a seemingly innocent girl named Pinky (Niharika Singh), who wants a break in films and who Sonu becomes besotted with. But that makes Miss Lovely sound more narrative-driven than it is. The idea here isn’t so much to tell “a story” (the plot, such as it is, could be scribbled on the palm of your hand, much like Pinky quickly writing her phone number down on Sonu’s hand during a stolen moment) but to create the mood of a particular world – the world of small-time moviemakers in the late 1980s, conducting shady deals, negotiating the chaos of a profession where things have to be done fast, in hurriedly improvised locations, with the knowledge that a police raid may always be around the corner.

Being abstract and often anti-narrative, this is a slow-moving film (I’ll confess my attention wandered at times) but it tries to do something very interesting: to admit us into this milieu, and the states of mind you might find in it, without over-explaining anything – letting the visuals, the art direction and the sound design do most of the work instead. 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 small and dimly lit and overcrowded, characters who are almost brushing up against the camera; there is a sense of drifting through shadowy places and hearing faraway voices as if through a tunnel. (I read that director Ahluwalia counts Seijun Suzuki among his influences. I don’t know Suzuki’s films apart from Branded to Kill, but parts of Miss Lovely reminded me of the work of another non-mainstream Japanese director of the 1960s, Nobuo Nagakawa, especially Jigoku, which offered a stylised vision of hell and its lost souls, looking for small salvations.) In fact, a viewer can get so steeped in this setting that it may come as a minor shock to hear – in one scene – the polished, anodyne voice of an English-speaking newsreader talking about exploitation movies and forced prostitution. These incidents seems like they belong to another world, the newsreader says in what sounds like a dispassionately patronising tone, and of course, from her perspective, they do.

But this is also an “other world” film in the sense of the past being a foreign country - it is a reminder that the late 80s and the early 90s were a time of transition, in India’s metropolises at least, and in the entertainment industry: the last years of the video-cassette culture, the shift to an era of multiple TV channels(!) and the greater possibilities they brought for home entertainment. We see Ambassadors and Fiats (and a few Maruti 800s) on the roads, black-and-white TV screens with pictures barely visible through static. Nataraj pencil ads play over transistors and little boys fight each other with makeshift maces, no doubt in imitation of the TV Mahabharata which would have been playing at the time. Even the film’s opening titles play like a homage to 1980s B-movies (or some 80s “A-movies” for that matter) – garish background colours, names like Biddu and Nazia Hassan improbably sharing space with Ilaiyaraaja. 

At the same time there is nothing dated about the contrast between the supposedly glamorous world of show-business (even in a C-movie universe) and behind-the-scene realities. A newspaper clipping places a photo of a starlet smiling out at the camera next to a picture of her muddy corpse found in a swamp. A mother tells a producer that her daughter will do anything and gets the approving response, “Bahut acchhe sanskaar deeye hain”. Throughout, one is aware of the divide between people who are motivated and single-minded enough to make a life for themselves in this world, and those who are unable to.

Which brings us back to Sonu, for Miss Lovely also begs the question: what might happen when a man with a strong introspective impulse, given to philosophising and dreaming, finds himself born to the manor of a coarse, cut-throat world like this one? His voiceovers (which overlap sometimes with the dialogue in a scene) include lines like “Aadmi ka level hona chahiye – level nahin toh aadmi kya”. He is too idealistic and too meditative to join his brother in playing the “bada game”. And for me one problem was that I didn’t really feel like I had got to know him, or understand how he came to be working in this business for so long without having his heart in it. One shot in that disco scene has Sonu, left in the lurch, holding two glasses and looking confused as the smoke of the dance floor envelops him. This film has many intriguing things in it, but its protagonist – the person we want to relate to or at least empathise with – remains as distant and hazy as that shot suggests.