Ek Chhotisi Love Story Hindi Movie
Ironically, Shashilal Nair's best film to date has been targeted as a sleazy peep-a-boo tribute to perversity - when in fact it's a hauntingly assembled jigsaw bringing together fragmented pieces of young and jaded hearts as they come into conflict with the exigencies of the loin.
The film opens with painstaking graphicness as a homage to the adolescent heart's palpitating passions. We see the 14-year old Aditya Seal, alone in a Mumbai flat with his old grandma (Saroj Bhargava), psychologically and physically trailing the voluptuous and decadent woman living in the apartment in the next block.
Nair's newly-recruited cameraman Murleedharan shoots the boy's inner and outer world with simultaneous subtlety. Deliberately, Nair dwells on every detail of the boy's platonic voyeurism - the way he bites into a sandwich at the exact moment when she does the same, or the way his eyes follow her with adoring eyes.
Raj Kapoor's depiction of an adolescent crush in Mera Naam Joker, this film captures the wispy tenderness of the boy's wandering heart in existential closeups.
Aditya Seal, a first-timer on screen, brings an astonishing delicacy to his complex role. His is the best, most assured screen debut since Kareena Kapoor's and Vivek Oberoi's. Thanks to the effulgent camera-work, we can see every beat of Aditya's heart on his face.
A lot of Seal's splendid emotive powers come from the fact that he plays his own age. Therefore, accompanying emotions of sexual and emotional awakening come naturally to him.
To our amazement (and that of the naysayers who've been gunning for the film without knowing what it's about), Nair goes far beyond the theme of pubescent crush to explore the relationship between sex and love and between love and infatuation.
Two crucial sequences between the decadent "there's-nothing-like-love, it's-just-a-two-minute-pressure-in-the-loins" woman and the smitten, adoring, worshipping boy have been exotradinarily well conceived and executed. When the boy Aditya, after being bashed up by his object of adoration's boyfriend (veejay Ranvir Shourie, looking mighty uncomfortable hitting the sack each time Manisha Koirala opens her door) meets her in her apartment's corridor she bluntly asks him, "What do you want? Do you want to touch me? Go out with me?" This woman means business. Alas, the boy means love.
That sequence, and the 'climax' when she reduces the boy-hero's great passion to a 'two-minute-pressure', chart out the woman's character with lingering lucidity. The film begins as an exploration of the boy's sexual-emotional awakening, but eventually becomes the story of the woman's painful consciousness of a love beyond the loins.
Manisha portrays the decadent, cynical Bombay girl with a certain rainbowy flair. But her avoir dupois prevents her from getting to the 'bottom' of the conflict - in more ways than one. It's hard to accept her as young Aditya's Venus-reincarnated.
But then at his age and in that impressionable and fragile state of mind, who needs a femme fatale to trigger off a chain of subconscious awakenings in the boy? In fact, in his original concept, director Nair wanted Aditya to be infautauted with a maidservant. Thank God for small mercies. Or going by Manisha's size, not-so-small mercies.
Far from being a voyeuristic voyage into the heart, mind and loins of a teenager, Ek Chotisi Love Story is in reality a film that espouses "pure" love -- whatever that might be. The boy's unconditional adoration for the raunchy woman in the flat opposite, is so spiritually idealized to seem almost seem naïve. He doesn't want sex. He wants love. At his age that might appear incongruous. But Nair makes the distinction between love and sex convincing.
MOVIE REVIEWS