Review : Anurag Kashyap's "Ugly" is a dazzling nightmare.

Ugly is a fantastic ordeal, a gripping police procedural furled in a haze of soiled consciences, sardonic dialogue and obnoxious characters, and one of the best films of the year.

There's also something rather odd about this Mumbai opus, but I can't finger what exactly. Perhaps, it's this: it's the most un-Kashyap film the auteur has made in his directorial career spanning a little over a decade. There is little indulgence, hardly any bloodletting and, for once, his flamboyant style of filmmaking is covert. With his typically despicable, irascible troop of characters for whom domestic violence and violence of the mind is a way of living, Kashyap weaves a hellish character study around the disappearance of a little girl, but he doesn't focus as much on the "disappearance" as he does on its repercussions.

Ugly is a story that underlines the depths that humanity can sink to when it is propped up against a bare wall. It is aimed to appall, to agonize, smeared by the grime of a menacing Mumbai, a city that no one knows how to capture on a camera better than Kashyap. In the bleak byways of the city (splendidly shot by Greek cinematographer, Nikolai Andritsakis), the story unfolds in a stream of aimless and helpless exchanges and blame games, occasionally coupled with helpings of black humor and a plethora of cusses. It's exactly the kind of film one would expect from Kashyap, and he knows this which is why he doesn't make it like he usually does, and that's where Ugly stands out. It wallows you in a world that Kashyap has familiarized his devotees with, and yet manages to be a seemingly novel take on the internal and eternal ugliness of a human mind.

The complications the disappearance leads to are unforeseen. As her panicky father and his friend go the the police station to lodge a formal complaint, the blase cop is captivated by the wonders of modern technology. It's slightly ruffling to see someone supposed to bail us out of trouble being fascinated by something so trivial in a time of bother, but this agitating sequence is beautifully effectuated by sharp, street-smart dialogue and diligently controlled performances that make it scarily amusing. Ugly bursts with such details frequently, allowing the vexations of its characters to flow freely until they get to you.

The girl's father, a struggling actor, is someone we sympathize with until, in a shrewdly placed flashback, we find out about his dark side, which cripples our sympathy for him in a flicker. His friend -- an ungodly believer, a detail of screaming irony -- too has a nasty side to his unusually calm demeanor. The girl's alcoholic, suicidal mother, divorced from her first husband, has cornered herself in a monotonous marriage with a tough cop, who hates her first husband, the struggler, with a vengeance. While the mother uses her second husband to shield herself from the piling frustrations of her first, her deprived brother tries to involve himself to earn himself a quick penny. They all have odious consciences that are masked by their concern for the vanished girl, but Ugly is an exploration of the moral monsters lurking inside them. A dark, depressing and dreary exploration that gets increasingly flustering with each passing moment, finally reaching a point where you feel as utterly impotent as the characters do. That's where I realized how good a film -- no, how great a film -- Ugly is.

The performances are sublime. Each character is vitalized wonderfully by the actors portraying them, and each emotion is articulated by finer nuances. The screenplay is structured expertly, each twist spaced out well, each character fleshed out brilliantly. The dialogue is so sharp, it could cut glass. While it was used in Kashyap's previous effort, Gangs Of Wasseypur, to simply add color to a grey world, it is used here to spectacular effect to propel the story forward. This is some of Kashyap's sharpest writing to date.

When Ugly culminates, one realizes that it actually was a deceivingly simple story all along and was intended to be a lesson in morality. And as a character study, it's a marvelous success. It unnerves, it engages and in its closing moments, it revolts. It leaves one a lot wiser and a little insecure, just as it is meant to. Sniff around for a seamless plot, however, and it will disappoint you.

Ugly is in the same vein as Kashyap's Paanch and Black Friday, and it is in that genre where he towers over his peers. Its abrupt commercial release, the last of the year, may have brightened our Christmases, but it certainly hasn't made them rosier. Many will leave the theater loathing it for its guts. And that reaffirms why Anurag Kashyap is one of our most treasured talents.

Review : Rajkumar Hirani's "P.K." is endearing but a bit too theatrical.

Rajkumar Hirani has spawned a brand of cinema that has many takers, that opens intriguing discussions and that can easily be a game changer as far as Hindi movies are concerned. He sermonizes, amuses and stirs, layers his plots with melodrama and has a knack for lacing them with throwaway gags. His films may be proudly theatrical, but they are not unnecessarily so. Hirani is a part of a phenomenon. His films are genuinely earnest in their quest to question the absurdities of life, of a system of beliefs and seek answers to questions that seem improbable, the answers to which delight us. Like the loony characters he creates, he has a certain way of seeing things that forms the nucleus of his films, and a certain way of exploiting what he sees. That is how he does what he does.

P.K. is no different. With the good part of the hype on its side and a weighty topic on its shoulders, it swaggers through a series of convivial episodes to a predictable conclusion, but it is a ride that is as flawed as it is thought-provoking.

It has neither the unflappable magnetism of the Munnabhai series nor the pure wackiness of 3 Idiots. But it is ambition and aplomb that eventually propel it over the finishing line.

In its opening moments, P.K. plays out in a manner that one would expect from Hirani. A voiceover -- critical in his previous film 3 Idiots, has no relevance whatsoever in this one, I'm afraid -- illuminates how an alien is stranded in the arid deserts of Rajasthan (I groaned, for aliens in a Hindi film look outlandish, but I needn't have worried) and is swiftly robbed of his only possession, thereby establishing an apt diegesis. In an independent strand, an inconsolable Indian girl, a victim of religious speculations, has to give up on her romance with her Pakistani partner. When the girl, who turns into a journalist upon her arrival in her home country, senses a story in the alien's attempts to retain his lost possession and realizes the worth of his curiosity, P.K. transfigures into a prudent, riotous and ultimately edifying satire.

Though the portion before P.K.'s foray into a full-blown satire is a bit cluttered, everything blends in seamlessly after. One thing that catches your eye almost instantly is its doughty approach to the material and its airy manner of expression. Living in a country that is oversensitive to the matters pertaining to religion and godmen, I was pleasantly surprised to find that P.K. has no qualms about mocking those who generalize in their name. Umesh Shukla's engrossing OMG: Oh My God! had similar intentions before it fell prey to a desire to please the believers in the audience and successfully hinder any kind of controversy, and hence ended up undoing whatever dynamic arguments it made. 

P.K. follows a similar pattern argument-wise, but it has a tastefulness that makes it easier to digest and harder to dislike. Some cleverly assembled sequences are apprising and hilarious, like a particularly lengthy one in which the protagonist is baffled with different kinds of people embracing different religions, hence different gods, who come with rules to comply in a house of worship. It's a tricky idea, but Hirani does it with such subtlety that it has the gentle pinching effect coupled with chuckles, which was the desired outcome, perhaps. The profundity found in the protagonist's naive queries is often overwhelming, a splendid bullseye. It is cathartic to see someone take intended potshots at the country's willingness to submit to religious barriers, but it does it in a refreshingly tolerant way. 

While P.K. works wonderfully well as a cogent satire in the first-half, it is the second-half where it stops being perceptive and lighthearted. As godmen culture, existing so freely in this country, is brought under the microscope, it switches to a more conventional narrative. There is an excellent sequence early in the second-half, but the lack of such potent punches makes that second-half drab. The climax is surprisingly clumsy for a filmmaker of Hirani's prestige, when the true face of godmen is unmasked in the flurry of a tear-soaked reunion and silent change of hearts, a typically theatrical touch but one that seems horribly out-of-place for a film that had little to no melodrama throughout. Or a dispensable bolt from the blue right before that. Or, as is the case in countless Hindi films, a half-baked romance that threatens to crumble the likability of the two primary protagonists in its final moments, but thankfully does not. Although these are relatively harmless defects when you look at the bigger picture, their questionable presence does irk somewhat.

P.K. has a couple of winsome elements (Sanjay Dutt's cameo is lovely, and personally my favorite part in the film) and some that don't work as convincingly. The screenplay is a bit frail in parts and heavily relies at times on coincidences, but the reasoning it brings forth deserves to be lauded. Also, rarely does it happen during a Hindi film that one sits in a theater packed with people; atheists, agnostics and believers who conform to different religions, laugh at themselves when a caricature of them presents itself on the big screen.

The tragedy here is that this approach works only in film; in the real world, these actions would have led to brief acts of violence and disorder. That makes P.K. a timely wonder.