UGLY, A Movie of Many Truths

While the storm is raging on for PK, UGLY has come and gone silently except for those who watched it. Anurag Kashyap’s epic on life in the metro’s depicts the dark realities of our times. Like an onion, the plot reveals itself layer by layer and the camera allows us to explore the different facets of life in a big city like Mumbai.

The narrative starts from a simple middle class family scene of a 10 year girl, Kali who is forcing her mother to ask her first husband and the girls father to take her for a walk. Tejasiwini Kolhapure plays the role of Kali’s mother who is married to an IPS officer (Ronit Roy) after leaving her first husband, a struggling actor. Kali is kidnapped by an unidentified man and the story runs through a search expedition to find her back. During this voyage we find many characters revealing their true colors, including her mother and father, the search goes on with confusion, tension and we get entrapped by the noise of the roads, lies of lives and the mistrust of relationships.

Sound is a powerful feature of this movie. The noise of modern lives, from the roads to the homes, from the public to the personal. At the end of the story sound is used very effectively again.

This movie seems to be similar to the movie ‘Shaitan’ in some aspects but UGLY’s edgy sharpness, honest plot and courage to challenge the system and society places it in a class apart.

‘Shaitan’ was also produced by Anurag Kashyap and directed by Vijay Nambiar. So the ‘shadow’ is visible but Kashyap has been more intense in dealing with the issues in Ugly. The intensity of narrative cuts you like a cold knife and sometimes you feel like have received a direct punch on your face.

Mumbai ‘s colorless suburbs are the location for the shoot and of course this is a spectacular feature of Kashyap’s movies. A realistic editing of shots shows the unexplored, raw locations like middle class localities and slums, lifeless dens of a metro city. The story is based in Mumbai but it could be any metro city and the characters and classes that dominate.

We are mesmerised by the cauldron of myth, reality and chaos. We run through the corridors of confusion, mistrust, greed and anger and at last find Kali. We are left feeling distressed, our feet cold, our brains numb.

Ugly reminded me of Nida Fazli’s “ Har Aadmi mein hote hain Das bees Aadmi/ Jisko bhi dekhna ho kai baar dekhna”. Kashyap was able to bring these lines alive through his cinema and make us part of that reality.