Cast - Tabu, Atul Kulkarni, Rajpal Yadav, Ananya Khare
Director - Madhur Bhandarkar
Heard of a movie, in recent times, without any songs? Thanks to Tabu, the young director, Madhur Bhandarkar, shows a burning rage and takes the souls of the viewers for a heavy song. It takes great courage to come out scathingly at the ills plaguing our lives, and Madhur has ounces of them and found a right partner in Tabu who fits the role like a T. A simple story about Mumtaz, a dancer in a beer bar that flourishes all round the city of Mumbai, is what Chandni Bar is all about. Not so simple is the fact that the girl in question goes through everything from love to rape, all in vain.
Fleeing her home in Uttar Pradesh after the riots, young Mumtaz finds herself in the quicksand of a beer-bar girl in no time. Accosted by her uncle, she reluctantly takes up the work, fetched by Iqbal Chamdi (Rajpal Yadav). Her misery of gyrating before leering men, takes a full circle as her uncle rapes her one day, in
a drunken state. But she finds some consolation with her fellow dancers who are worse off, but still maintain a cheerful gait. Girls who are forced into prostitution by their husbands
et al, is a common sight. One day a local goon, Pottya Sawant (Atul Kulkarni) sets his eyes on Mumtaz. Hearing her story, Pottya offers to marry her, and for once Mumtaz chooses the better option, gets married and starts living with him.
Briefly we get to see the light in the eyes of Mumtaz, the housewife. She becomes the mother of two kids, Abhay and Payal, and pulls up Pottya with tongue-and-cheek comments, before the genial gangster finds himself killed in an encounter.
Atul Kulkarni, comes up with a brief but telling performance, and continues to make his presence felt, a la "Hey
Ram". Pottaya's untimely death, shows Mumtaz the real world, as the friends of yesterday turn indifferent. As a woman, who knows making a living only by dancing, Mumtaz is sucked back into the bar. But she brings up the children dutifully, until fate pushes Abhay into the hands of the police. The only way out was to pay up the bribe, when all her savings and that of Iqbal Chamdi's fall short of the requirement. To save her son, nothing short of sleeping with a stranger would do, and Mumtaz is verily forced into it, by compassion. Overhearing her mother talking to Iqbal, Payal quietly goes about all by herself to Chandni Bar, and starts another heartrending saga of a young girl pushed as a dancer in the beer bar.
A word of mention for the impressive, yet brutal dialogues by Mohan Azaad and Masud Mirza, that will surely shake the conscience of all and sundry. Ananya Khare as Deepa, the bosom friend of Mumtaz stands out in the supporting role. It has been a quiet journey for Tabu from 'Maachis' to
'Astitva' to 'Kandukondain Kandukondain' to 'Chandni Bar'. But the career graph of the
sober Hyderabad girl has been soaring. She has what it takes, and comes out with a stellar performance, that will melt even the iron hearted. "Almost a close experience of death" can be an apt way to summarize how someone would feel coming out of the theatre after watching the movie. Mark it, it is not a film for the faint hearted!
R R Vasudevan
