Thanks to Tabu’s indescribably sensitive portrayal of lost innocence, we are completely sucked into Bhandarkar’s seamy world of disgraceful exploitation. Chandni Bar leaves you sobered and stunned by the story of the protagonist Mumtaz’s pilgrimage from innocent loss to tragic doom. Director Madhur Bhandarkar not only tells a disturbingly genuine story, he tells it in a manner that’ s never sluggish or pretentious. His Mumbai throbs groans, purrs and whines with the beat and heat of everyday happenings.
Cinematographer Rajeev Ravi portrays the pulse of the city almost by impulse. In one of this heart-wrenching earthy film’s very real and traumatic episodes, the protagonist Mumtaz (played with extraordinary brilliance by Tabu) who has lost her husband and self confidence, sits with her only friend, a pimp (Rajpal Yadav) looking up the numbers and calling old clients to make some fast money to get her son out from prison.
The abject humiliation and self abasement of that ageing woman as she hears her friend whining over the phone with potbellied lechers on her behalf for a night of perverse pleasure, is so intense, we flinch as though we’ve been slapped in the face.
An ex-associate of Ram Gopal Varma, Madhur Bhandarkar earlier made a crude compromised commercial film called Trishakti. In Chandni Bar, he finds his metier. Bhandarkar’s sharply moving and extraordinarily wry film delineates the journey through life’s slush and potholes of a small town UP girl Mumtaz who is brought to Mumbai by her uncle, and given employment as a beer bar dancer .
The director, with his keen eye for visual details, creates the titillating claustrophobia in a beer bar with its casually cavorting girls. Bhadarkdar makes good use of Bollywood songs over the decades. From 1985 when Mumtaz arrives in Mumbai to wriggle to Lata Mangeshkar’s sensuous melodies, to 2000 when Mumtaz is ‘promoted’ to waitress while Alka Yagnik blares Dilbar Dilbar for the swinging bar girls in the foreground, Chandni Bar features one of the most articulate Hindi film soundtracks ever.
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But this isn’t a provocative film about half-clad dancers simmering in discontent. Bhandarkar’s looming narrative takes his memorable protagonist from innocent abandon to unexpected hope and faith to finally plunge her into tragic and irredeemable despair when Mumtaz's innocent teenage son is sexually raped in prison, one of the most graphic and terrible scenes in Hindi cinema.
In this grim story of dignity and optimism amid extreme abuse and sorrow, one yearns for slivers of sunshine. You start to question whether the good guys have left the world that Bhandarkar creates because the migrant life in Mumbai is depicted as being so miserable. The script (written by Mohan Azaad) piles one savage injustice after another on Mumtaz’s life, so that when the gangster Pothiya (National Award winner Atul Kulkarni) comes along to marry her, we heave a sigh of relief.
Astonishingly the beer bar, which is at first a symbol of female degeneration and exploitation, gradually begins to seem a sanctuary for Mumtaz and the other dancers. These girls (connecting with elegant giggles in a guttural setting) gather to share the suffering brought on by the vicious men in their lives.
There’s the ever-looming danger that a film about female exploitation would end up being guilty of the very social disease that it sets out to castigate. Bhandarkar is able to avoid that danger to an admirable degree, thanks to the presence of Tabu. After her superlative-defining performance in Astitva, Tabu once again proves herself to be the finest actress of the post-Shabana Azmi generation. One twitch of her lip, a slight movement of her eyebrow conveys a wealth of pent-up emotions . As Tabu expresses the inexpressible anguish of her character there are no words in the dictionary to praise this truly international actress .
Without Tabu's presence that defined the script, it's difficult to say if Chandni Bar would have succeeded. She receives strong backing from Atul Kulkarni. Though his role of the volatile gangster echoes the unforgettable Bhiku Mhatre in Satya, Kulkarni fleshes out the character with subtle humour and grim menace.
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The bar girls are played with conviction by authentic-looking actress. But a couple of them could have toned down their boisterous mannerisms. Minor flaws apart, Bhandarkar’s film rips you apart with its brutal and unflinching honesty.
In Chandni Bar, sex—which has long been a major source of filthy titillation in popular Hindi cinema—is shown as a cruel bartering tool. We can never forget the over-the-hill Mumtaz ‘s expressions of desperate self-loathing as she tries to use sex to get her son out of wrongful imprisonment. We can never forgetChandni Bar for portraying the sleazy life in Mumbai with such fluency and grace. True, the men in Mumtaz’s life from her treacherous uncle (Suhas Palsikar) to her husband’s vulgarly self-serving friends could have been portrayed a little less bluntly.
However, we haven't truly given our kids a pretty and optimistic world. Chandni Bar reminds us, at times rudely and at other times gently of this savage truth.