There are primarily three types of people entering a movie theater. One who truly believes that a movie is life and everything shown can happen sometime in life. Second are those who walk into the hall just to enjoy, leaving their conscious mind at the doorstep of the Audi — they look at the film as it is served and consume it like a 5-star meal. But there is a rare community of viewers who enter with an alert and conscious mind, who record as well as analyse all that is being served to them and truly understand a film and its objective.
Mind you, this review is primarily for the third kind of audience — and also to wake the other two from their deep slumber. If you are a hardcore Bollywood fan, what follows might hurt your sentiments, so please make a choice. If you still choose to read, it is entirely up to you.
Now let's talk about a factory which started baking and serving its propaganda to you when you were just a little child, but some years into the business thought to give its bread a nice and attractive packaging so that you would leave aside the obvious question of the raw material used to bake it. The packaging is known as the new concepts of love and romance. The factory is known as Bollywood.
The latest item baked in the Bollywood factory but less talked about is the film Ulajh, starring Janhvi Kapoor, Gulshan Devaiah, Roshan Mathew and Adil Hussain, directed by Sudhanshu Saria and produced by Junglee Pictures.
The first half of the film shows the lead as the all-new semi-confident — or mostly under-confident — IFS officer who carries a huge family name and some diplomatic instinct in her heritage. She is promoted to the post of Deputy High Commissioner at the UK Embassy. She is good at her job but clueless about surviving in an unknown city in such an important post.
The lead is shown as a lonely woman trying to fill the silence with work, weak on emotions to the point that she does not bother with background checks before dating an unknown person who, strangely, has no one else to go to. As is the Bollywood film that it is, dating means going past all limits — which finally leads to honey-trapping.
The film reaches the interval with the exposure of a global conspiracy with blackmail as its starting point. This conspiracy involves the Home Minister of India and the Defence Minister of Pakistan working together for their personal interests — the Home Minister saving himself from an old bribery case, and the Pakistani Defence Minister wanting a regime change. The centre point of the conspiracy is the new Pakistani PM, who must be eliminated for both dreams to sell off.
In the second half, very suddenly, the young nepo IFS officer acts much more confident and finally starts using her brain by seeking help from a colleague RAW officer. The film ends with both of them successfully stopping the attack and being recommended for a covert unit under the PM.
LOL Moments from the Film. — The Pakistani PM wants peace talks with India and, to that end, agrees to return a terrorist so that Pakistan's image can be improved. — To honour this hand of friendship, the Pakistani PM is invited as a guest for the Indian Independence Day. — Once honey-trapped, the DHC moves forward stupidly, either attacking the blackmailer or trying to end her own life. — The IFS officer listens to and believes the communist bullshit that the blackmailer — first revealed as an ISI agent and later as a freelance contract killer — tries to sell her; she entangles herself in a series of problems but does not share any of it with her colleagues. — The film finally tries to bring disgrace upon the R&AW by involving a RAW officer in the conspiracy. — Like Raazi, this film also explores the 'Only Me and Why Me' concept.
ROFL Dialogue Moment. The blackmailer, Humayun, tells IFS Suhana Bhatiya: ग़द्दारी, वफ़ादारी — ये सिर्फ़ अल्फ़ाज़ हैं सुहाना। Capitalists के बिछाए हुए जाल जिसमें सिर्फ़ हम जैसे उलझते हैं। Nations, borders — सब रेत में खींची लकीरें हैं, इनकी कोई क़ीमत नहीं।
Conclusion. Bollywood has always tried to sell its ideology and propaganda in the packaging of love and romance, and it is high time that we Hindus and the Nationalists try to stop these things using the different means available to us today.