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Ashdoc's Movie Review---Shab

ashdoc

Movie Critic
SPNer
Jul 19, 2011
391
219
49
Shab has a lot of things going for it . Firstly , it has great background music . The songs too are definitely worth listening to again and again . Secondly , it has beautiful cinematography . Some scenes like one in which there is darkness around but lights are focused only on the faces of the protagonists , or the one in which a character slowly fades away into brightness as she passes out of the film are photographed brilliantly . Acting is good from everyone too .

Even better are the looks of the females in the film . Raveena Tandon has matured like old wine and I daresay that she looks fuller hotter and sexier than how she looked when she was younger . Her cleavage is ample and her body ampler . The other female is Arpita Chatterjee , who has a beauty of her own and looks real cute in her bob cut hair .

But the film falters on two major points . As it nears it's climax it goes nowhere , with most characters splitting up with each other rather than coming closer which would be the desired ending . The other point of course is that some of the characters are gay . While one or two gay characters would have been acceptable in the film , the number of them is four---way above the acceptable limit in a conservative country like India . Maybe that is why the audience stayed away and there was practically no one in the theatre ; the cinema patrons had probably got the gay vibes better than I had even before the film had released and not come to the cinema hall . They probably knew about the fact that director of the film Onir is gay , something that I had overlooked .

The film starts with small town boy Ashish Bisht coming to big city Delhi to become a model . But he has not lost his small town attitude and ends up only being the keep of socialite Raveena Tandon---not a bad proposition actually , considering her hotness . Her gay friend Raj Suri does give Ashish the chance to become a model , but Raveena wants to keep him for herself even though she has dalliances with other men . Ashish however falls in love with Arpita , whom he meets in a restaurant as a waitress who wears enticing clothes showing off her delicate back and her lovely armpits and her bra straps . The owner of that restaurant ( Areesz Ganddi ) is gay and has had a breakup recently with his boyfriend . In his life comes a french man ( Simon Frenay ) who has a tragic past . Arpita is a sex worker in secret , who is being stalked by one of her clients and threatened by that client's father to get out of her stalker's life . And so on and so forth...

Problem is , even though all the characters interact with each other , the intersection of their lives is mostly for the period shown in the movie and in the end they go their own separate ways . In short the film goes nowhere . There are some emotional and sentimental moments in the movie , but they do not leave a lasting impact .

The film does move at a relaxed pace , and may appeal to those who like off beat films . It is for the liberal crowd who find nothing wrong in gay relationships and have sympathy for those who are frowned upon by mainstream society , for all the characters in the film are those in whom mainstream society with find something wrong and will treat with disdain and contempt---gay men , a prostitute , a kept man of a rich woman , the rich woman who is frustrated with her husband's affairs and keeps boys . Though I like off beat films , I am not a liberal and could not empathise .

Verdict---Just about okay .

Two stars .
 

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