Director Anurag Basu, 12A, 131 mins.

Stars: Shilpa Shetty, Shiney Ahuja, Kay Kay Menon.

Shilpa’s back in Bollywood! The stunning star’s first release, after her Celebrity Big Brother win, examines the complexities of relationships in India’s zany metropolis, Mumbai.

Bored housewife and mother Shikha (Shilpa Shetty) commences a platonic relationship with aspiring actor Akash (Shiney Ahuja), with predictable consequences.

Neha (Kangna Ranaut) has a knack for falling for the wrong type of guy. Her current mistake is Ranjeet (Kay Kay Menon), her married boss, who takes her to a borrowed flat for their illicit meetings.

Single Shruti (Konkona Sharma) is 28 – and still a virgin. Should she “take a chance” and declare her love for the nerdy Debu (Irrfan Khan)?

This is not a conventional Shilpa saucy song and dance massala movie. She is sari-clad throughout and just one of the many middle class characters in director Anurag Basu’s attempt at meaningful Indian cinema. Shetty’s Shikha acknowledges that her stale marriage is like “living in hell” and is willing to consider an alternative.

However, Basu’s film is cinematically unsatisfying. This is because it is, like his earlier Murder which was copy of the Richard Gere starrer Unfaithful, unoriginal. Shikha and Akash meet and fall in love Brief Encounter-style but the conservative resolve to their ‘stolen Thursdays’ in this monsoonal metro is a copout. Consequently, there is no new insight into Shetty’s stock ‘woman at the emotional crossroads’ character.

Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is the obvious inspiration for the Neha-Ranjeet storyline, and its mixture of comedy and pathos is endearing.

Basu also pilfers entire sequences and dialogues from two groundbreaking Hindi films. The scene in which Shikha confronts her cheating hubby and asks him if he would forgive her if she had done something similar is straight out of Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth. Further, Basu shamelessly repeats an entire gay subplot from Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3 and, outrageously, gets the same actress (Konkona Sharma) from the original to re-enact it.

But to evoke comparisons to the superior sources is to reveal just how shallow and derivative the film is. It all rings true but the pace drags, and the pretentious placement of the annoying songs with the non-stop appearance of an ugly bunch of rockers is simply irritating.

Despite piquant performances and raising some mordant questions about love and marriage in the Indian context, the movie’s “listen to your heart, not your mind” message is pure Danielle Steel.

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