Fashion Alert!

After a bout of shopping on Sunday afternoon, we decided to pay a visit to Rex to watch Fashion. We'd have done better had we chosen to indulge in some Hara Kiri, although by the end of the movie our brains had anyway committed suicide. But let's begin with a proper beginning, shall we?

Madhur Bhandarkar: I remember reviewing Chandni Bar for our final year tabloid. And i remember crying buckets over the movie, praising it to heaven and back, thinking it was one of the most beautiful films ever made. Tabu was excellent, Atul Kulkarni i developed an instant crush for; the rest i don't remember. I remember saying to myself, now here's a director who can capture realities of life without overdramatising. So when his next movie, Page 3 came out, i couldn't wait to see it.

Like Farhan Akhtar set his standards with Dil Chahta Hai and then decided to play ball(s) with the boundaries - therefore the screw up that i believe Lakshya was - Bhandarkar followed the same trend. His Page 3 wasn't even a hundred miles close to what Chandni Bar was. One could clearly see that he was on commercial movie-making mode. (Remember item song about a woman being thirsty and looking for the well of love or some shit like that???) Then came Corporate, Traffic Signal and the latest, Fashion. And a pattern emerged - leading women are near-bitches; leading men are almost always gay; at least two hearts need to be broken; at least one person you don't expect to die, dies; lots of moralising happens; the movie almost always picks on people with drastic actions and drastic consequences; oh, and drugs, don't forget drugs - lots of sniffing, smoking up and nasha. The drugs though? I think Bhandarkar outdid himself in his latest flick.

Fashion: One word - Aaaaaargh.

Stereotyped, and how. Full of cliches. Some clever bits where he tries to make everything seem very authentic, and which efforts of course, fall flat.

Chandigarh Chidiya Priyanka Chopra goes to Big Bad Bombay (henceforth BBB, if i mention it again which is doubtful because i'll be too busy bitching about the rest of the movie) and turns into a wild fox. Oooooooo, thrilling. She meets several men, all of whom are gay or married (that sort of rung a bell with me), sleeps with two, gets stoned out of her skull constantly, drinks straight from a giant Smirnoff bottle while ripping on the roads in the early hours of the morning, starts throwing attitude from the time of her first assignment, begins smoking when she breaks up with her boyfriend and just generally acts like a bitch for no reason. Oh correction, she sleeps with three men - the last, when she's snorted at least five rows of cocaine and bumps into a man at the club. Oh oh, and guess what? The most memorable scene in the movie? When she wakes up after this cocaine-induced lovemaking session to find that she has slept with (drumrolls) a Black guy! OMG! Her conscience suddenly breaks through her wild side, she wants to kill herself, she goes into depression, her souls dies. All because she sleeps randomly with a Black guy.

My question is, it could have been a white guy, or even a sleazy Indian chap. Why did Bhandarkar choose a Black guy? Does he consider that to be the worst category of the human race an Indian woman can sleep with? I mean, really. This is a new low even for Bollywood. (Some interesting alternate questions that came up among my group of people: What if the Black guy was a leading Fashion Designer from Africa? What if the Black guy turned out to be Denzel Washington? Or Will Smith?)

Then there's whatsername Bangle (Kangan-a) Ranaut, rival of Chandigarh Chidiya Priyanka. She did nothing in the movie but snort cocaine (i told you Bhandarkar outdid himself), sip wine and call her boyfriend "You bastard, you bastard" every five seconds in the most brittle voice one can imagine. Her ruin comes to her on the ramp, when her dress comes undone and her boobs are displayed for the world to see. (Of course, here the director plays the Bharatiya Sabhyata Ke Thekedaar and pixellates her bustline, which clearly has a skin-coloured tube underneath all that pixellation). Distraught, Bangle walks backstage and breaks down. Then she hears Chandigarh Chidiya coo about "Only Bangle can tell if it was a publicity stunt or not" on TV, and surprise surprise, she snorts more cocaine and injects drugs into her system. She goes into rehab, comes back 2 hours and 45 minutes later for 5 minutes as the Mute Model (thank God for small blessings) who is rescued by the new and improved Chandigarh Chidiya. At the end of 5 minutes, she's found lying in some gutter, dead of OD. In short, her role was completely pointless. (You'll hear men sighing heavily, nodding their heads in despair that they didn't even get to see her bust.)

So anyway, the story goes on for 3 tortuous hours in this fashion. (Pun DEFINITELY intended.) In fact, the audience was so restless that by the end of the movie, when Chandigarh Chidiya hears news of Bangle Ranaut's death by OD (despite her brave efforts at playing Jesus) and refuses to walk the ramp, the theatre roared at her to just frikking walk and get it over with. (I think Rex was to blame as well - apparently, the last standing oldie will be torn down soon to be converted into, duh, a mall. My surmise is, they're taking their final revenge on poor unsuspecting viewers by screening movies like Fashion; and that too unedited, uncut.)

Oh wait wait! I forgot the closing shot! Chandigarh Chidiya on the ramps of Paris sharing it with top supermodels as (that's right) Chandigarh ki Chamiya! So you're seeing these Anorexic women in quarter-clothes and suddenly you have a (in comparison) thunder-thigh, bulky Chidiya Chopra in a bad haircut and a metal barrel belted at the waist with more metal! Awww, how sweeeet. After all her trials and tribulations, she emerges smelling of...is that aluminium on her dress?

P.S: Mister Bhandarkar, the next time you make a movie, make sure that AT LEAST the pop corn is good. And take tips from Hitchcock or our very own Ghai on doing cameos in their own movies.