Film: Fashion

Directed by: Madhur Bhandarkar

Cast: Kangna Ranaut, Priyanka Chopra, Mugdha Godse

Showing at: City Pride Kothrud, City Pride Satara Road, E-Square, Fame Akurdi, INOX Pune

Fashion, an ultra-close look at the fashion industry, is a mix of the strange and the familiar: That's what happens when you pick your film out from the headlines. It's Madhur Bhandarkar's forte, and with his latest, he's got the mix— the glamour and the dark underbelly, the highs and the lows — just right. Enough to titillate, not to alienate, making it very watchable.

Telling his story through a starry-eyed small-town beauty queen is a clever stroke — he makes it a strong hook for a million girls like Meghna Mathur (Priyanka Chopra), all of whom want to head to Mumbai to become, as the character says, a supermodel. But again, like in Bhandarkar's others, the semblance of a plot is just an excuse to string together a series of scenes in which People like Us think happen to People like Them — the director kowtows to public perception, adding just the right amount of masala to whet appetites.

Models smoke, drink and sleep their way up. The only successful designers are gay. Coke is the ultimate accessory of the beautiful people, and that's not something that comes out of a bottle. But Fashion is a more sophisticated film than, say, Page 3 — the director is no longer shocked at salaciousness and sleaze, and that matter-of-factness of the taking is what makes the film so seductive.

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