4 out of 5

Directed by: Kiran Rao

Well.  It was in my Netflix queue for lord knows what reason, perhaps based on some review or recommendation that I’ve since forgotten.  The description – four intersecting narratives! – and the ‘Mumbai Diaries’ subtitle already had me eye-a’rollin’, expecting a clumsy, indie, travelogue humanity = love affair, and the opening handheld shots of someone narrating their first Bombay / Mumbai experience had my “skip” trigger finger going itchy.  But I persevered.  (So brave am I.)

…And after a few minutes of the flick doing just what I expected, it… didn’t stop, exactly, but it didn’t settle into the patterns I was expecting.  Traveling daughter-of-rich-construction-magnate Shai (Monica Dogra) floats on the peripheral of couture, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and nursing a photography interest; she befriends dhobi – a clothes washer – Munna (Prateik Babbar) at least in part so that she can photograph him at work in the Dhobi Ghat; Munna happens to dhobi for famous, reclusive artist Arun (Aamir Khan), who met Shai at a recent gallery opening, resulting in a drunken one-night stand; and Arun, moving into a new apartment in the slums, becomes obsessed with the woman  – Yasmin – in some homemade tapes he discovers in the apartment, the tapes an intended gift for a family member, narrating her experiences in Mumbai and her recent marriage.  Yes, this is the narration on which we opened.

A love triangle-ish of Munna likes Shai likes Arun likes Yasmin develops, and meet-cute / romantic comedy accidents happen, but Anil Mehta’s screenplay, or Rao’s handling of it, is what kept me interested.  These interactions are very natural, and not dolled up; while the film is an exploration of Bombay culture and class, Kiran seems content to let us make up our own minds about whether that culture and the class separation we’re seeing is good, or bad, or rich, or shallow, or even important at all.  Gustavo Santaolalla’s carefully emotional score assists with this, delicately stepping between themes partially playful, partially mysterious, partially ominous.  The film does wander, as that’s its very m.o., letting these character wander into and out of others’ paths, resulting in its curious but intriguing tone: what’s the point of what we’re watching?

A much more informed review suggests, to me, that my whitey white outsider context isn’t allowing me to register the film’s shallowness, or see that it is guilty of being fluffy indie fare.  That’s certainly possible, if not likely.  But I’m pretty sensitive to media that wants me to feel something “easy” or bite-sized, and I never got that sensation from Dhobi Ghat.  It’s lolling structure is indulgent, and there’s undoubtedly a giant unconsidered piece regarding the status of the woman on the tape and Arun’s unseen ex-wife and the mess of cross-cultural gender politics that one could pick apart, but that seems like an analysis for a different film.  Rao, I’d believe, wanted to capture a kernel of the whirlpool-attraction of Bombay, for better or worser, and imply that whatever we see is just one moment of an ongoing, unending larger tale…  Dhobi Ghat uses some indie tropes to do that, but its application is skillful and intriguing nonetheless.