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EDITOR'S PICK
Rating: *** 1/2
Which demons could possibly provoke two normal healthy ambitious young people to
kill a man, cut his limbs into several pieces and attempt to dispose of his body
in the thick jungles?
Not A Love Story attempts to unravel the abiding mystery of human
nature and the extreme measures it resorts to, when pushed to the brink.
This is the frightening, sobering and life-changing story of Anusha Chawla (Mahie
Gill), a small-town girl with big Bollywood dreams, who ends up being an
accomplice in a gruesome crime.
We certainly are left open-mouthed.
Indeed it is the normalcy of Anusha`s dreams and how drastically they get
subverted within the time-frame of a few decisive days, that forms the core of
the compelling, often repugnant but always riveting, crime drama.
Ramu`s camera is frequently more frenziedly crazy than the deeds of the
protagonists.
The frames are used as a wildly wicked playground to signify the unsettled
mindspace of the lead couple.
Gill and Dobriyal`s journey from desperate love to unthinkable crime is charted
with a kind of subverted dismay that is the opposite of the dramatic sighs and
gasps that Hindi cinema usually uses to punctuate crime dramas.
Sandeep Chowta`s background score tends to overpunctuate the point in the
earlier portions.
Zakir Husain pitches in a perfectly-modulated performance as a tired but canny
police officer.
But towards the end, the film builds up a desperate atmosphere of a crime of
passion with the excessive margins in the film`s emotional graph being magically
reduced and eliminated.
All the craziness of the camera angles becomes one with the insanity of the
crime committed by two people who, before butchering their victim, had probably
only committed minor offences.
The sheer lunacy that divides normalcy from the unpredictability of life is
captured with a brutal forcefulness.
Not a Love Story is not an easy film to watch. Crime has never
looked more unglamorous on screen.
Varma just sucks you into the ghastly deed and doesn`t allow you a moment of
respite from the savagely probing camera which seems to penetrate the mind and
soul of the protagonists.
Deepak and Mahie pull out all stops to deliver bludgeoning performances in this
first-rate crime treatise.
And yes, the ironical use of Varma`s Rangeela theme song drives home
the message of a young wannabe star`s dream gone awry. You leave the film with
the painful sound of crashing dreams reverberating in your ears.