Heroine: Cliche Mash Potato

Madhur Bhandarkar has come up with the classic cropper, this time round. Heroine stands out for its stereotypes and tiring cliches. The trilogy, which began with Page 3 now ends (we hope) with the saga of Mahi Arora, a small town girl from a broken family, who is the 'wild child' of the film industry. Her downfall
is so ridden with the predictable failed career, drinking-smoking and wrong- men syndrome, that you end up laughing during the most intended serious moments in the movie with a sense of miserable deja vu. Intermission comes as a relief, while you wipe your tears of laughter and brace yourself for the next dose of baloney. While Page 3 and Fashion had fairly strong scripts to redeem the leading ladies, Heroine lacks script, soul and hey presto, a story too.

Bhandarkar's so called insights into the bad world of films is so dated. Who is he kidding here? Girls who step into the industry these days are educated, well-groomed, smart, know their way out, and do not, I repeat, do  not suffer from the middle class morality pangs that Bhandarkar attributes Mahi to ocassionally suffering from. We can clearly see that Dirty Picture got in the way of Bhandarkar's vision...though he and his leading lady have gone blue vociferously denying this in public. So, he ends up dishing out what remains no longer his signature hard-core riveting fare nor does he end up making an honest bio-pic. What we get to see is a hotch-potch of various incidents in Mahi's life, the variants of which we have long since heard or read about in cheap film glossies. There is no way you can explain away the oodles of cleavage shown by almost the entire female cast, including Mahi's psychiatrist (the talented Achint Kaur in a small, small, teeny weeny appearance). Item numbers, a lesbian episode between Pramita (Sahana Goswami, wasted in a cameo) and Mahi...Bhandarkar, one guesses, has tried every trick in his book to make his disaster look window dressed , and tell the world how a 'heroine's life, her follies and frailties' go.....yawn.....

A strong supporting cast - Helen, Lilette Dubey, Govind Namdeo, Sanjay Suri, Arjun Rampal, Randeep Hooda, Sahana Goswami, Ranvir Shorey and Divya Dutta - tries hard to alleviate the film. Kareena's pathetic attempts to emote, her confusion in whether she retains her usual filmi mannerisms or whether she becomes a Balan or whether she actually rises above and takes her acting skills to the next level ends up in a nightmare for the cine-goer. Who is to blame here? Her director? I figure, yes. He had presumedly promised her a monumental epic, a Swedish smorgasbord....yes, this is indeed, an epic dud.