A pimp played by Saanand Verma is seen enjoying chicken biryani with his sex workers. They are discussing the initiation of a young girl into the profession when the pimp out of the blue says, “The more legs we open up, the more chickens legs we can enjoy.”
This qualifies as one of the most disgusting lines ever heard in any film in any language. Exactly how the censor board allowed this putrid sexist sleazy comment is a mystery. Artistic licence? But where is the artistry that we saw in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion, Chandni Bar or Page 3 or even the fun quotient that we saw in the director’s last work Babli Bouncer?
India Lockdown is weighed down by some terrible acting and some of the clunkiest writing in recent times, with characters showing up anywhere anytime. How the duck does the senior citizen Nageshwara Rao(played sensibly by Prakash Belawadi) who is heading from Mumbai to Hyderabad to be with his pregnant daughter (Hrishita Bhatt) run into Madhav (Prateik Babbar) who is walking from Mumbai to Bihar during the lockdown?
If Bhandarkar’s Geography is so poor couldn’t have at least consulted a google map? Or maybe, just maybe, he is trying to say that the pandemic and the lockdown had rendered all concepts of time and location redundant.
The first hour or so of this segmented saga is all about sex. It seems everyone’s libido was exacerbated during the lockdown, none more so than the sex worker Mehrunissa (Shweta Prasad) whose flesh-in-the-pan transaction comes to a groaning halt during the lockdown. To make ends meet she offers virtual sex to her clients.
These touchless close encounters would have been funny if better written. The dialogues(Amit Joshi, Aradhana Sah, Bhandarkar) are sickeningly cheesy. They bring down the film’s equity drastically when you have a horny teenager (Satvik Bhatia) telling his girlfriend on a laptop chat that he gets “a hard-on” just speaking to her. This kind of “liberal artistry” is nothing but sleaziness posturing as realism. That the censor board gets taken in is an indication of how misled it is about the line between talking straight and talking dirty.
Self-restraint is absent in much of the storytelling, rendering much of the scenes woefully trite and vulgar. Topping the long list of incongruities is Prateik Babbar’s Bihari accent. This is the worst impersonation I have ever seen of a Bihari. Babbar says his performance is dedicated to his legendary mother Smita Patil.
A neatly restrained performance comes from Sai Tamhankar as Prateik’s wife. She is convincing in a film where there is a virtual competition for over-the-top acting. Aahana Kumra as a pilot (in uniform at home during the lockdown) hitting on her young neighbour is trapped in an embarrassingly awkward role where she must play the woman of the world without appearing too “sexy”. Her dance of seduction before the bewildered boy next door is a hoot.
India Lockdown seems to have no idea of the panic people experienced during the initial months of the pandemic. It slides across the surface tension unwilling/unable to capture the desperation underneath. Even the long lockdown walk back home by migrant workers is made into an occasion for sleazy sexual innuendos.
If there was actually a baby boom during the lockdown as statistics suggest, then Bhandarkar’s film is about the quest for a crèche that never knows where to go.
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