Ugly Review: Lovely Portrayal Of Ugly Side Of Human Nature

By Ians English

Rating:
4.0/5

The much awaited movie Ugly directed by Anurag Kashyap has released today amidst much expectations. Anurag Kashyap is known for his unorthodox approach towards relationships and this film Ugly digs deep into the human nature which is certainly ugly at times.

Ugly tells us what William Shakespeare did centuries ago. Human nature, by its very nature, is rotten and to the core. You cannot escape your basic nature of self-serving greed.


Everyone in Ugly which features Ronit Roy, Rahul Bhat, Tejaswini Kolhapure, Vineet Kumar Singh, Siddhanth Kapoor and Girish Kulkarni craves for something more than what he or she has in life. It may not be a better life, but there is a hankering for escape. Hence, the aforementioned wife Shalini (Tejaswini) trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman, who is not unkind, simply insensitive to her needs, reveals an ugly side to her personality with a suddenness that leaves us repelled.

Fathers, mothers, friends and lovers were never meant to behave the way they do in Kashyap's kingdom of the doomed and the damned. The camera (Nikos Andritsakis) looks on with brazen brutality at the below-the-belt antics of an inebriated unbalanced mother(Tejaswini Kolhapure), her policeman-husband (Ronit Roy, sturdy and sinister), her former husband (Rahul Bhat, immersed in angst) and his best friend (the natural-born scene-stealer Vineet Kumar Singh).

Wait. There are others. Like Kashyap's other parable of perverse times, the plot is glutted with characters, each played with such astute unassumingness that they had to be cast by a master caster, certainly not Chaitanya (Vineet Kumar), the self-employed casting director in Ugly who, like others characters, plays his own games of avaricious one-upmanship when a 10-year girl disappears from her father's car in a crowded street of Mumbai.

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True to its corroded deceptive heart, the narrative of Ugly is shot in the pokey bylanes and buildings of Mumbai that have seen better days. So have the characters, if you ask me. All of them seem to have a happier back-story, which given the present crisis-ridden context in their lives, seems like a cruel joke.

It would be criminal to reveal more of the plot. Suffice it is to say the film requires immense concentration from us. It's not just the writers who have toiled on the nuances. It's the actors who bring to every scene a certain unrehearsed turmoil. Towards the start of the cat-and-mouse chase to the 'fiendish' line, there is a very lengthy scene where Rahul and Chaitanya, frantic with worry after the former's daughter disappears, try to patiently explain to the policeman on duty the bizarre chain of events that have transpired.

You know these characters are played by actors. And that there is a camera recording their activities. But you let yourself believe this is not make-believe.

Ugly is a film of many surprises, most of them unpleasant sordid and unsavoury. The actors are not acting for the camera. But their characters seem to be constantly play-acting with one another. Deception seems to run through the gamut of sordid characters.

It's a master-stroke to cast Rahul Bhat as a Bollywood struggler. That's what he has been 'playing' for years in real life. The bitter rage that the character expresses is so bonafide that the line dividing the actor and character seem blurred. Vineet Kumar Singh as Rahul's best friend has the film's lengthiest and most dramatic scenes. The hungry actor juices the scenes for all they are worth.

The same is true for Tejaswini Kohapure. Ravaged and ruined, her face expresses the unmitigated grief of a woman scorned, spurned and rejected. She is dangerous.

In one sequence where she asks her husband why he married her, Tejaswini's imploring eyes reminded me of Meena Kumari in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. And what a 'sahib' Ronit Roy makes! Chauvinistic, sadistic, brutal and yet revealing himself to be the only morally healthy characters among the protagonists...Ronit, again after Udaan, proves himself to be that actor explorer who can find a moral centre in the most undesirable character.

Every actor is brilliant. Take the chubby guy who plays the husband of item girl Raakhi, the embarrassingly saucy Surveen Chawla. Special mention must be made of Girish Kulkarni as Inspector Jadhav, the policeman on duty who is so full of cynical sh*t that you never want to be in a police station in your life.

It's funny, how some of the most memorable characters in recent times are played by actors in supporting roles as policemen. Funnier how films that address the absolute erosion of values in current times, to the extent that even the parent-child relationship is compromised in Ugly, scare the audience.

The characters in Ugly are ruthless, dark, desperate and dangerous, more to themselves than others. Anurag Kashyap's Ugly is a thriller which leaves us with a sense of utter futility about the quality of life that we lead.

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