Star cast: Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Randeep Hooda, Shahana Goswami, Ranveer Shorey, Govind Namdeo;
Directed by: Madhur Bhandarkar;
It is hard to imagine just how Madhur Bhandarkar pitched this movie to Kareena Kapoor, India's highest paid actress.
It's called stereotype, and Madhur Bhandarkar has parlayed it into a career. Film after film he embraces clichés -- about businessmen, models, journalists -- and exaggerates them, reveling in caricature and nasty dialogue. It's like a recreated dramatization on a sensationalist television crime show, with marginally better actors and production values.
Actually, to be fair, Heroine is quite stupendously glossy, with every actress soaked in bronzer, and much flattering lighting. And the actors really aren't the problem here, each of them -- even the disastrous ones -- earning more than their fare share just for keeping straight faces through this gibberish.
In his 13-year-old career, Madhur Bhandarkar has won accolades basically making one movie. It is a film that tells us a woman on top in a man's world will habitually suffer doom, after an elaborate moral science session has played itself out on the screen.
Heroine offered Madhur the irresistible scope to track that formula in a Bollywood setup with Kareena Kapoor in the lead. The movie runs on standard Madhur Bhandarkar fuel. You spot the filmmaker's fondness at creating fiction amidst a well-researched bag of facts. For Madhur, the research must have been easier this time since he was out exposing his own work space.
The film industry milieu in Heroine is one you are aware of if you routinely dig the gossip glossies. It's a world where compromise is a way of life, friends and foes are chosen to suit vested interests and morality is a luxury you can ill-afford if you want to rise. And yes, a single woman bitten by the success bug will always have a price to pay.
The woman in question here is Kareena as megastar Mahi Arora. The chinks in Mahi's world of perfection are laid down soon enough.
Madhur's movies are known to give the heroine one vital flaw that will facilitate downfall. In Mahi's case the flaw lies in her bipolar character, obviously an outcome of the fact that she is a loner who pines for true love. She thinks she finds it in the married superstar Aryan Khanna (Arjun Rampal), but her obsession for the opportunistic Aryan can only lead to heartbreak. Rapidly growing uncertain of what she wants, Mahi starts losing out. A career that demands nothing short a perfect image has no place for an actress with mood swings.
The problem with Heroine is the film banks on a weak script. Clearly, Madhur and his co-writers (Manoj Tyagi and Anuradha Tiwari) were trying to give us a wicked update of Fashion, his 2008 movie that also dug for showbiz skeletons. His new movie however lacks the element of surprise. Worse, at a runtime of about two-and-half hours Heroine looks like a long-drawn boring affair.
There are the authentic snapshots on the way, though. Madhur unleashes an authentic guessing game straight off real-life Bollywood with individual scenes. An actress pours wine on the head of a star wife in a party. A cricketer (Randeep Hooda) is known for his glad eye for heroines. A 'family man' superstar (Sanjay Suri) insists on adding an item number by a top diva in his movie to steal his heroine's thunder because she spurned his advances. A rival actress (Mugdha Godse) plays dirty to wrest a top endorsement deal. These are all straight off gossip buzz.
Yet, none of these subplots take off because the film's assortment of characters essentially comprises cardboard cutouts.
The actor who suffers the most due to bad writing is Randeep Hooda. He gets the body language and style just right as the cricketing hero Angad Paul, only to be rudely yanked out of the script at one point.
It could all be redeemed by the star of the show. But then, Kareena unexpectedly overacts. Despite being in almost every frame, she never really overcomes the highly flawed character she gets to play.
Madhur Bhandarkar, toasted for the heroine-oriented scripts he creates, has just given us his weakest female central character yet.
But "Heroine" still works, and works wonderfully in some places. There's an inconsistency to the storytelling that works effectively in putting the protagonist's deeply flawed and fractured character into a pulsating perspective wherein we can no longer distinguish between the fatal flaws of the main character and the action and reactions that have been written to define her flawed existence.
You come away from the film haunted by Kareena Kapoor who plays the ethereal diva with overwhelming honesty. Bhandarkar rips into the artifice of showbiz with vigour and tenderness. Like its heroine, the movie is flawed, but also bewildering, beguiling and yes, beautiful.
Overall, it is an average film.
