Mr Singh Mrs Mehta

Film: Mr Singh Mrs Mehta Cast: Prashant Narayanan, Arun Shields, Naved Aslam, Lucy Hassan Dir: Pravesh Bharadwaj Rating: * Mr Mehta (Prashant Narayanan) is an artist who rolls more joints than he uses his paint brush. One day he follows his busy wife to a hotel and hides behind a pillar to watch her enter a hotel room. He is unable to make sense of her suspicious behaviour until he meets a young woman, co incidentally spying from the other side of the pillar. He discovers that she is Mrs Singh (Aruna Shields), a woman who claims to be the wife of the man that his wife is having an affair with. Of course, neither confronts their 'dis'repective other halves, nor do they move on with their lives. As Mr Singh & Mrs Mehta take off on vacations, their miserable other halves have endless conversations about their spouses over long, long, long walks as Mr. Mehta smokes many, many, many neatly rolled joints. At some point, Mr Mehta, clearly inspired from 'Leo & Kate' in the 'Titanic', decides to paint Mrs Singh in the nude. The awkward and fumbling Mrs.Singh poses like a limp praying mantis and arouses Mr.Singh's paint brush. If you stuck needles under your eyelids you might be awake to watch the rest of this dreary affair. They have yawny sex, make more boring conversation and roll even more joints. Soft porn seekers, dont be excited, the few nude scenes are either blurred or pixelated (and we were thankful for that as there is no steam in their bed). How Mr Mehta & Mrs Singh return to their respective lives and what effect this affair has on their marriage, forms the culmination of this badly shot, amateurly acted (barring a few moments from Prashant Narayanan), and terribly directed mess that is Mr Singh Mrs Mehta. Aruna Shields emotes like a piece of cold metal and her portrayal of the heart broken wife is at best a caricature that might leave you in splits. At some point in the film, she flashes a telephone bill and cries out to her artist lover saying 'My husband called your wife 87 times and he only called me 32 times!' We wished Mr.Mehta would offer the cranky woman some of his cannabis and quiten her down a bit! Alas, he did not. As I crawled out of the empty cinema, gasping for clean air, I prayed that they would stop making such trash in the name of independent cinema and offer better films to wasted talents like Prashant Narayanan and Naved Aslam.

Many of the readers might recall that in the eighties, there was a particular genre in Hindi cinema which mainly revolved around subjects of infidelity, extra-marital affairs and some unusual man-women relationships. The movies released under this genre, more or less relied just on their skin-show and few controversial scenes which easily used to become the talk of the town in those days. Among the famous directors of such movies was Vinod Pande who came up with films such as, Ek Baar Phir, Yeh Nazdeekiyan, Ek Naya Rishta and Sach. Post 2000 too he came up with two more movies on this same old pattern of his, which were, Sins (2005) and Red Swastik (2007) featuring Mona Chopra in the lead, now famous as Sherlyn Chopra.

The present Mr. Singh Mrs Mehta is also exactly made on the same guideline, which believes in only way of bringing in the viewers and that is by showing few naked bodies at regular intervals of its running time and nothing else. With only a one line script and four characters cheating with each other as its base, the movie solely depends upon its erratic nude scenes and has nothing else to offer in the name of cinema.

Right from its first scene itself the director clearly shows his main purpose of making the film and even the posters of the movie convey the same. Sharing a similar theme with “In The Mood of Love” (Hongkong) (2000), Mr. Singh Mrs. Mehta doesn’t offer you a single moment to enjoy. The pace is lazy, the developments are boring and the performances are just not worth talking about. In fact, in few scenes, its the dialogue delivery of Aruna Shields (the nude model), which brings in some laughter in the theater.

In straight words its probably the worst movie of this year wherein the direction is poor, Cinematography is amateurish and the acting is pathetic. But coming to the nude scenes in the movie, the handling of those sequences both by the director and the Censor Board clearly reveal the double standards of our Indian Culture we are living in.

Our society has always believed in suppressing things especially whenever it comes to sensual interpretation or subject of sex used by the medium of art, literature or cinema. And Mr. Singh Mr. Mehta once again proves this eternal truth prevailing around us from ages.

In this current example, at one end the director is trying to take advantage of the sexual curiosity or craze in the younger generation by putting some nude scenes in his film which actually have no meaning at all in the script. And on the other hand the Censor Board even after giving it a clear Adult Certificate, blurs down all those scenes entirely and leaves everything on the individual imagination of the viewers making it even more sexual or rather funny for the audiences. So in a way with “Mr.Singh Mrs. Mehta”, both the director and the Censor look like trying to make a fool of the viewers with their own childish kind of suppressing acts.

But thankfully our Indian viewer’s intelligence has grown significantly in the last decade, with the World Cinema now coming at our door steps through the digital medium. So now no such attempts can fool the audience anymore and the producers should stop making such crap in the name of multiplex movies or new age cinema of any kind.

Ratings : 0.5 / 5

(By Bobby Sing from www.bobbytalkscinema.com)