And she’s just not interesting enough for us to spend two and a half hours with. Mahi is just a trembling mass of furiously smoking insecurity from beginning to end. Sadly, Bhandarkar has saddled her with a character without an arc. She looks sensational, but is also brave enough to risk being ugly on screen, literally and figuratively. Kareena Kapoor works very hard to give Mahi depth. Helen, playing a yesteryear superstar, gives us the moral of the story: that selling your soul for the glitter of glamour will always, always end badly. Mahi weeps and weeps and then, weeps some more. But in the second half, everybody gets serious and the laughs go out of the window. Honestly there’s a lot of fun to be had with dialogue like this. Like, ‘Babes, why are you so tensed?’ In one scene, a man tells his male lover something like ‘Hamari industry mein zip aur zabaan dono band rakhni chahiye’. Everyone is posturing and playing politics. There are the stock Bhandarkar gay characters and several catty rivals. She also has a tough-talking publicist who tells her: You have to be a player now. We meet Mahi’s lovers, a superstar played by Arjun Rampal and a cricketer, played by Randeep Hooda. Clearly, ladies such as these can come to no good. Both women are smoking and knocking back scotch. At one point, we see Mahi hanging out with her mother.
Why is she like this? There is some half-baked story about a broken home. She pops pills, gets psychiatric treatment, can’t be trusted to hold her alcohol and usually looks like she’s a heartbeat away from a nervous breakdown. We are introduced to actress Mahi Arora, played by Kareena Kapoor, who is some sort of wild child. It’s hugely entertaining, unintentionally of course. The first half, though, has a delicious, camp quality to it. But Heroine doesn’t even deliver the frisson of a good Stardust story. There’s alcohol, affairs, a sex tape and even – gasp – a lesbian one-night stand. Bhandarkar and his team of co-writers – Anuradha Tiwari, Manoj Tyagi and Niranjan Iyengar – bung in every possible element of masala. After all, what better subject for steamy scandal than the life of an actress? But sadly, Heroine never rises to the occasion. This seemed, to me at least, like a perfect fit of maker and material. It’s supposed to be our window into the muck, the Machiavellian politics and the Faustian bargains that a life in the limelight necessarily entails. Heroine is Bhandarkar’s great Bollywood exposé. But invariably, the narrative includes a strong conservative streak so viewers can leer and still feel morally superior. His movies are voyeuristic, sensational, sleazy.
Bhandarkar is a proudly pedestrian director.
Actors: Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Randeep HoodaĪ Madhur Bhandarkar film has the same allure as a juicy tabloid or some particularly nasty gossip.
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