Movie: Chandni Bar

Actors: Tabu, Atul Kulkarni
Director: Madhur Bhandarkar, Producer:



Something ingeniously exciting is happening to the Bombay cinema these days. It even seems to have stolen a march over the other media.

At a point of time when Indian newspapers and magazines are predominantly

superficial, and television increasingly imitative, new energies seem to be erupting from a film world that had been choking on its frivolities a couple of years ago.

The year 2001 had started on an uncertain note at Bombay, with only one major success at the box office,Mohabbattein, starring the two badshahs and the reigning queen of Bombay and made to filmmaker Yash Chopra’s now near-perfect recipe of love lyricized to the spice of mild conflict.

However, the summer of 2001 has turned into a season of creative abundance. Madhur Bhandarkar’s film Chandni Bar, which opened on 28 September, is the latest tour de force to stun audiences with its ingenuity of purpose.

Coming in the wake of Gadar, Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai, this hard-hitting film report on the underside of Mumbai’s glitz marks out a new score sheet for offbeat Indian filmmakers. Perhaps the low budget, art-house Hindi film is making a comeback.

Chandni Bar is a disturbing film about the contemporary landscape, reminiscent partly of Govind Nihalani’s Arth Satya, and it casts a shadow on the easy charms of consumerist glamour.

Mumbai’s beer bars with their dancing girls have been around since the late 1970’s. It has taken over twenty years for somebody to point out that these are but the contemporary version of the zamindari era’s mujra halls, and a camouflaged extension of the brothels of Forass Road that spreads across the city’s suburbs.

Madhur Bhandarkar’s film takes us through the grime that constructs the lives of those who are forced to migrate to the city and of those who dominate the city beyond the veneer of westernized, middle class security.

It gives us a harsh new look at the nexus between glamour and crime, criminals and cops, avarice and survival, in the slums and the shabby rooms where the dancing girls of Mumbai’s beer bars live and daily endure personal and sexual humiliation.

It is the dramatized cinema verite look of the film that is its strength and gives it an independent identity when compared with other films in the genre such as Ram Gopal Verma’s Satya and Mahesh Majrekar’s Vastav.

Director Madhur Bhandarkar and his key technicians give us a controlled display of cinematic manipulation from the opening sequence itself, as a young teenage girl from Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh) is forced to flee her village after a communal holocaust kills her parents and destroys their bustee in a raging fire.

With a middle-aged mamu (maternal uncle) the girl Mumtaz (played by Tabu) ends her journey as an innocent village girl in a Mumbai slum. Cinematographer Rajeev Ravi’s candid hand-held camerawork through the narrow lanes and into a dismal Mumbai hovel sets the visual tone of the film. Accompanied by a high-pitched and equally calculated musical score, Chandni Bar now comes into its own as a film that reports on Mumbai’s underbelly. An India that educated, middle-class citizens never get to see.

The mamu’s local contact, referred to casually as a fellow villager, is a small timer on the fringe of Mumbai’s underworld. The girl Mumtaz is quickly drafted as a dancing girl at the Chandni Bar, a beer hall run by a nondescript businessman from society’s lower dregs.

The film’s secondary theme of innocence violated on the underside of the megalopolis is a bit puerile in its sentimentalism, and not removed from an older anti-city tradition in sub-continental narratives..

However, this is a film on an urban slice of life.It is the manner in which the beer hall is cinematically constructed, and the topographical and psychological architecture of life sketched out in a Mumbai slum, that make for the primary theme of Chandni Bar.

The nautch girls on the dancing floor inside the beer hall, and the raucous voyeurism of its male patrons, claw at the average sex-obsessed Indian’s delusions of sexual glamour. Tabu makes a fine art out of a neophyte’s clumsiness. Along with the bare midriffs and the tiers of flesh falling out of the skimpy lehngaa-choli costumes of the more experienced girls, it punctures the prospects of any cinematic masturbation in Chandni Bar.

Shot at 3 Mumbai beer hall locations, and in film studios at Hyderabad, this film is more concerned with its starkly worded statement on the fears and horrors of daily life on the seamier side of the urban divide. The dancing girls see their patrons as suckers to fleece, and the beer hall’s clients consider the girls to be prospective sleeping partners. But it is only the girls who are walking a tight rope. Their targets are the consecrated customers who keep the beer hall running, throwing hundred rupee notes around in a fashion that, strangely enough, echoes the festivities of the baraats of the urban rich, particularly in north India.

For the price of a cinema hall ticket, Chandni Bar presents us with a graphic and detailed performa on the entertainment style of Mumbai’s new kothaas. And, inevitably, gives us another sharp insight into the violent characters which so ominously populate the Indian back street these days.

Tabu’s shining face draws the impetuous Pothya Sawant to her. A hitman of one of the city’s dons, Potya Sawant is a mobster on the rise. As played by Atul Kulkarni, we have in Pothya another display of power histrionics, one that would match Kulkarni’s portrayal of the Hindu fundamentalist in Hey Ram. Kulkarni is an actor to watch; as charismatic on the big screen as the young Nana Patekar of the early 1980’s.

Free sex now surrenders the screenplay to true love. Mumtaz and Pothya marry. Pothya is promoted to become the don’s generalissimo, but the very violence of Pothya’s character betrays him, even as Mumtaz believes that she can bring herself and her children out from the cold. To avenge a friend’s death in a police encounter, Pothya stabs the police informer and so vitiates the local nexus between the cops and the underworld.

Pothya is betrayed by his boss and for Mumtaz a chapter of difficult times begins.

It is at this point that Madhur Bhandarkar’s film tends to become sentimentalist, instead of being street-smart, which is how one would have expected the real-life characters of Mumtaz and her son Abhay to behave. Instead, the script is in too much of a hurry to prove that Mumtaz, her son Abhay and her daughter are but inevitable victims of an epic tragedy.

It is from this point in the film that the highly dramatized cinematic style begins to go adrift, alienated from an essentially sentimentalist evocation of the urban tragedy. The son is raped in a correction home, the daughter becomes a nautch girl herself. Mumtaz’s fate is sealed in a scene that is derivative of Shabana Azmi’s famous weeping climax to Ankur (1972). It is a moment for which Tabu the actress isn’t quite ready.