'Saali Mohabbat': Grace sprouts, slow and glorious

A long, continuous pan shot; gratuitous B-roll; and those convenient look-off-into-the-distance segues: the signature flourishes of early-2000s Bollywood that raised an entire generation on melodrama and monsoon-soaked yearning. For all its mediocre lines and gleeful implausibility, it was cinema at its most conscious — raw, poignant, and unabashedly editorialised.

Actor extraordinaire Tisca Chopra, seemingly borrowing from her own time on such sets, turns these hallmark textures into her directorial debut, ‘Saali Mohabbat’.

She spins a tale out of the shushes and simmering resentment of small-town India’s middle class, looming the crass, grim fabric always with an odd tenderness — like a fraying quilt one still reaches for, out of habit.

The story settles into Fursatgarh, where Smita (Radhika Apte) fashions — or feigns — domestic refuge among her plants and her husband, Pankaj Tiwari (Anshumaan Pushkar). An abusive gambler, Pankaj demands constant subservience; Smita complies, until she doesn’t.

Her cousin Shalini Saxena (Sauraseni Maitra) moves in with the couple for work, and promptly begins an affair with Pankaj. When both land up dead, corrupt cop Ratan Pandit (Divyenndu), who once nursed his own lust for Shalini, takes up the case.

Eschewing the obscenities and shock-factor violence that clutter today’s screens, the film lingers — gently, consensually — on each frame for a blink longer than expected. It refuses to amplify trauma with funereal aesthetics; instead setting darkness against mildew and block-printed bedsheets.

Here, darkness barges uninvited into the altar Smita has curated — as it often does for women — as Chopra declines to glaze it in macabre gloss. She lets the viewer arrive at horror by contrast: the soft, homey mise-en-scene making the rot gleam sharper.

If one were to be finicky, the film plays predictably safe. Narratively, it walks the road taken so often it has potholes the size of cars — taking away the mystique of the ‘who’ in a whodunit.

Also, it opens with Apte — here identifying herself as Kavita — narrating a cautionary tale before slipping into Smita’s saga. The writing musters only slightly more finesse than schoolboys telling horror stories to each other, torches below chins and all.

Where it grows past its early-2000s roots is in its engagement with taboo: the mechanics of lust, and a woman’s need for — or right to — pleasure. Strictly speaking, the film could have survived without emphasising the latter. It would certainly have been more ‘palatable’. But its insistence on broaching the topic lends it an almost disarming energy.

Playing safe rewards the film in its casting. ‘Saali Mohabbat’ picks actors to do what they do best. The small-town saree-clad timid revolutionary with an indiscernible rural accent feels more Radhika Apte than Apte herself at this point, and she delivers with her usual mix of gusto and restraint.

Divyenndu — magnificently — embodies the crooked cop like the human manifestation of a paan stain on a public wall. Maitra and Pushkar hold steady beside the seasoned thespians, while Anurag Kashyap — as Gajendra, a shady gambling boss with an up-and-coming rapper style — and influencer Kusha Kapila — channelling a full West Delhi millennial straight out of her Instagram — thrive on home turf.

‘Saali Mohabbat’ stands as a quiet but insistent reminder that Bollywood needs more women’s voices — not because they must “prove” anything, but because only a woman could have made the film with the grace and dignity it carries.