Viewers barely made it through images of Satish Kaushik’s naked torso twice last year. A new bar has been set:
Loosely based on the Bhanvari Devi sex scandal, Dirty Politics can best be described as Om Puri’s Boom. In Lalit Modi’s Rajasthan, Puri plays a dirty old minister with his heart and groins set on a dancer named Anokhi Devi (Sherawat). A suggestively voiced song is dedicated to them getting hot and heavy between the sheets. This is not something that can be unseen; bras snap, lips meet, his nose snakes down her thighs through her cleavage… and I can’t go on. Naturally, a blackmail subplot hinges on this sensuous scene; a CD with hidden camera footage pops up (zooms, handheld, color coding, tilts – magic!), leaving the political landscape buzzing with sleaze.
There’s also an overcrowded oldschool plot of a CBI investigation being conducted around the disappearance of this mistress-turnedpolitico. Fine actors like Anupam Kher, Naseeruddin Shah (both in their A Wednesday avatars), Rajpal Yadav, Jackie Shroff, Sushant Singh (why?), Atul Kulkarni (why?) appear as vague caricatures destined to be drowned out by a perplexing background score. Ashutosh Rana should seriously rethink his macho moustache-twirling image; where has the awe-inspiring Gokul Pandit from Dushman gone? Surely, he still lives. He’d have a thing or two to say about Sherawat’s patchy dialect and ‘Ripple Dissolve’ video transitions.
K.C. Bokadia is no small name. He defined the landscape of 80s procedural potboilers, but he fails to justify an exaggerated political environment by not employing the larger-than-life services of Sunny Deol, Dharmendra, Amitabh Bachchan or Rajinikanth here. I feel sorry for the crew that works hard on these goodwill efforts, for they’re at the mercy of unprogressive creative minds.
