Thanks to Tabu’s indescribably sensitive portrayal of lost innocence, we are completely sucked into Bhandarkar’s seamy world of disgraceful exploitation. Chandni Bar leaves you sobered and stunned by the story of the protagonist Mumtaz’s pilgrimage from innocent loss to tragic doom. Director Madhur Bhandarkar not only tells a disturbingly genuine story, he tells it in a manner that’ s never sluggish or pretentious.
His Mumbai throbs groans, purrs and whines with the beat and heat of everyday happenings. Cinematographer Rajeev Ravi portrays the pulse of the city almost by impulse. In one of this heart-wrenching earthy film’s very real and traumatic episodes, the protagonist Mumtaz (played with extraordinary brilliance by Tabu) who has lost her husband and self confidence, sits with her only friend, a pimp (Rajpal Yadav) looking up the numbers and calling old clients to make some fast money to get her son out from prison.
The abject humiliation and self abasement of that ageing woman as she hears her friend whining over the phone with potbellied lechers on her behalf for a night of perverse pleasure, is so intense, we flinch as though we’ve been slapped in the face. An ex-associate of Ram Gopal Varma, Madhur Bhandarkar earlier made a crude compromised commercial film called Trishakti. In Chandni Bar, he finds his metier.
Bhandarkar’s sharply moving and extraordinarily wry film delineates the journey through life’s slush and potholes of a small town UP girl Mumta.
