Dhobi Ghat: Dirty laundry

One appreciates Aamir Khan’s avant garde approach towards Indian cinema — after all this is the man who produced the epic Lagaan and directed the issue-based drama Taare Zameen Par — but his latest venture Dhobi Ghat feels very much like an over-ambitious and underworked project.

Written and directed by Aamir Khan’s wife Kiran Rao, Dhobi Ghat revolves around four different characters in Mumbai and how their lives eventually connect. The characters are Shai (Monica Dogra), an NRI investment banker and passionate photographer who has recently returned from the US; Arun (Aamir Khan), an introvert artist who has a one-night stand with Shai; Munna (Prateik Babbar), a dhobi who wants to become an actor; Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), a married Muslim woman, whose video diaries Arun discovers. The narratives of these four individuals run parallel to each other and it is the dhobi who ends up connecting all of them as he delivers laundry to Arun and Shai.

Kriti Malhotra gives a phenomenal performance as a confused housewife talking to the camera, but overall Dhobi Ghat suffers from implausible characters and poor casting. Which dhobi in the world has a six-pack and a chiselled face? Prateik’s overgrown stubble is meant to give him a mucky look but instead makes him look ruggedly handsome, very un-dhobi-like. Why would an NRI banker be interested in taking pictures of a dhobi? More intriguingly, how she survives a photography excursion in a dhobi ghat with cleavage on display is another unresolved conflict. Similarly, Aamir Khan’s character, while interesting, was riddled with loopholes.

There is also a puzzling emphasis on tea in this film — whether we are shown a random meeting or a torrid sex scene, it ends with a steamy cup of tea. The fatal flaw for the film is its style — it vacillates somewhere between neorealist and absurd cinema but leaves no impact on the viewer. The film’s handheld free-flowing camera movement reminds you of Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, but whereas Winterbottom’s treatment is justified by the content, Dhobi Ghat’s isn’t. It seems like a film made by a fresh film school graduate who wanted to make a documentary about Mumbai but decided to insert narrative to make it more interesting - the result was Dhobi Ghat. The only real avenue for this film is at international festivals, not for entertainment in cinemas. The screenplay looks like a rough cut, not a finished project, and some really good actors that can contribute to Indian art films have been wasted. Sadly there aren’t even the usual song-and-dance sequences which in this case would have been welcome to break the monotony.

Post Dhobi Ghat, Aamir Khan will hopefully realise that he is talented and his wife is not. He should concentrate more on films like Ghajini and 3 Idiots because even if he doesn’t get to attend the Filmfare Awards, he will still be a part of Bollywood.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, February 20^th, 2011.