The much-revered Female Gaze falls on the men in this twisted and unbecoming thriller like a ton of bricks. Every man who walks through the tirelessly sordid screenplay is either necking or flocking with women who are not their wives.
And the one man who is not playing cheesy games with women is an aging gardener who helps the heroine dispose of corpses. Amen.
Corpse reminds me of the cocky cop played by Divyenndu. Normally, this actor can lift any boulder on his shoulder. But this time he is just not equal to the task. As the khadi-wordy Ratan Pandit he throws heavy passes at the easy-to-woo Shalini (Sauraseni Maitra), referred to by everyone as ‘Salini’, as, you see, this is a small-town in… Bihar? UP? I am not very sure where this town exists. If it exists at all.
Everything in Saali Mohabbat seems hazy, muddy and murky. Only the Shero, Smita seems certain about her uncertainties. As Smita is played by Radhika Apte we know she won’t take the bullying and the betrayal by her husband Pankaj Tiwari (Anshuman Pushkar who deserves a lot better than this cardboard cad who is bad just to make the heroine look good).
The switch from being the Abused Wife to the Coldblooded Killer is so abrupt, I felt we were watching two different movies mashed into one. Neither very interesting, I might add.
There is neither sense nor sensibility in Smita’s switchover from docility to homicide. Is she possessed by a deadly demon? Is she smoking something she shouldn’t be? Or is she just having the time of her month?
For the answer to these and other berated questions, stay switched on to the sticky sequel which may or not come, depending on how well debutante Tisca Chopra’s film is taken. Saali Mohabbat, so called because the heroine’s husband has an affair with her cousin (fortunately a female), is a mystery story. It is a mystery why the screenplay favours darkness even the light shines into its nostrils? Why are the characters so uniformly nasty(except of course the aforementioned gardener, played by Sharat Saxena, who is not allowed to be nasty even when he is helping a murderess) and why is the film so choppily edited, as though the footage was put through a grinder?
On the plus side, director Tisca Chopra has a flair for humour at unexpected moments: when the unfaithful husband takes his Saali clothes shopping he spends 2K on her and Rs 250 on a saree for his wife.
I admit the above is not really ROFL . But it is a relief from all the cussing, growling and groaning that goes on in the name of the opposite of love,no, not lust. Speaking of which, the love making scenes are so clumsy they seem to have been shot by a priest on a break from missionary duties.
