Eight reasons to watch "Ugly"

A film like Ugly will probably get overlooked in the season’s festivities and it’s a bad, bad idea not to factor it in to your holiday plans. It’s bitter chocolate to your sweet cake fest and the ideal foil for the season. A splash of cold water on your reveries in winter, and an unmissable comeback for one of the Indian film industry’s sharpest directors, the always-shades-of-grey Anurag Kashyap.

1. Thank God for Ronit Roy: He is the one demigod in the pantheon who isn’t screaming from the hilltops about his abs but has them carved out of the same marble. Karna to Bollywood’s Mahabharata-like joint family, this television actor turned to the big screen carries the film on his obsessive-compulsive-taut-with-a-restrained-edge-of-violence shoulders. From the set jawline to the implosions of frustration, Roy plays Soumik Bose, the control freak husband to the constantly intoxicated Tejaswini Kolhapure, power crazed cop, and stepfather to the missing girl like a guitar string, wound a smidgeon too tight.   

2. Follow the phone calls: Who is calling whom? Who is speaking to whom? Whose line connects where? The complex web of calls that, if you notice carefully, never quite connect, making this one of the most finely-woven webs of intrigue you’ve seen yet. Intricate and dexetrous, Ugly’s success lies in its ability to set up an expansive distrust and an inherent dislike of all the characters in the first half-hour. The spoilt brat of a soon-to-be-missing child included. Mark your loyalties at your own peril.

3. Edge of the seat relationship drama: Running parallel to the phone calls but inversely are the relationship twists. Who is in cahoots with whom? Who is seducing whom? Kashyap holds forth his treatise on the dismal faith he has in the female species and their ability to seduce, discard and betray. Not even the hitherto cinematic sacred bond of mother and child is spared. Kashyap points out the hypocrisies across all manner of relationship from husband and wife to male bonding and friendship. It’s a smorgasbord of misgivings.

4. Spot the cigarette: If Anurag Kashyap spent a year-and-a-half fighting the censor board for the use of the cigarette scenes without warning, then surely it must be integral to the storyline. Except. Where? Make a drinking game of it (if you can sneak some tequila into the theatre that is, and hey don’t blame us when you’re caught) and take a shot every time you spot a cigarette. For the record, I don’t think you’ll get very drunk. Why Anurag, why?

5. Police picture: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech at the DIG conference notwithstanding, the film is one of the few that is severely unkind to the police. From hidden brutality rooms, makeshift soundproofing, to something as basic as the interior of a senior officer’s designated police car and goings on within it – the level of trust between a senior and his immediate subordinates that extends to their knowledge of his personal life er... hitting the ceiling, and their superior’s eccentricities, and negotiating themselves around it, are intimacies of everyday police life Kashyap has wormed himself into with a perspective that even his erstwhile mentor Ram Gopal Verma, never really achieved. The police won’t like it one bit, and as anyone in the police force will tell you, more than one fits the description more than most.

6. Nuance: Not every director captures nuance the way Kashyap does. How does a control freak of a cruel husband also manage to be her rescuer and at the same time deeply respectful of other women colleagues on the police force? There is a constant quivering line between loyalty and betrayal, like the entrails of a prawn that Kashyap begins to yank out of the flesh of the story in the second half. Enemies must form alliances just as they reach the end of their tethers. There is the deliberate wearing down of the limits of human endurance as you are dragged to the top of the hill to be thrown off the cliff again. It is not pretty, but it is necessary. Where does Tejaswini Kolhapure’s Stockholm Syndrome end and freedom begin? Is a tenuous friendship possible between old enemies to restore the child? And who here is more kidnapped than the other?

7. People: Kashyap’s people are not over glamorised mannequins. From the police officer, played strikingly well by Girish Kulkarni, to the sleazy best-friend-cum-casting agent, played by Vineet Kumar Singh, and the overly sincere I-will-let-my-wife-and-child-starve-for-my-art Rahul Bhat, there is a gruesome reality to the people who inhabit Kashyap’s frames. The character close ups reveal human beings, open pores and all. It is a manner of weaving a profile that depends neither on dialogue alone, nor script and plot, but on the commandeering of the dark people are capable of, spilling forth in expression, gait, stance, that Kashyap achieves. The brutality of is not plot, but people: a toomuchness of them.

8. The canvas: The tapestry of Mumbai - for that is what Kashyap is in a way all of Bollywood is not – a Mumbai filmmaker – is woven like an artist of the noire. The bleakness seeps through the paint peeling walls of the cramped hovels of strugglers, in the uniforms hung out to dry in the dilapidated police colony residences, in the washing machine positioned beneath the mirror in the home of an overambitious dancer, marrying for money, and a fragile stability of creature comfort, as much as it is in the back alleys of a dance bar in the hands of a gun dealer or the abandoned offices of a decrepit Naaz. The detail is in a hanging wire, an unpainted wall, a shade of grey, a shade of black, a shade of white and a director with an unmistakeable cynical eye, who knows the difference.