Rating: 1.5/5 Stars (One and half stars)

Star Cast: Raveena Tandon, Arpita Chatterjee, Ashish Bisht, Simon Frenay, Gaurav Nanda and Areesz Ganddi

Director: Onir

Shab Movie Review
Shab Movie Review

What’s Good: Cinematography and music

What’s Bad: Confusing story, slow, boring

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Mohan is an aspiring model. He comes to Delhi from Gadwal with a dream of becoming a model but gets rejected in the audition. However, one of the judges Sonal Modi gets attracted towards him. Mohan is bankrupt and when he is on the verge of leaving Delhi, he approaches Sonal for a job. Sonal, who is in a disturbed marriage, ‘hires’ him for satisfying her on the bed and introduces him to the world as her personal trainer. She renames him as Azfar, the gifted one! Sonal keeps on using Azfar promising him that she will introduce him to a good designer.

Raina/Afia is a waitress in a cafe who falls for her French neighbour Benoit, waiter at a cafe. Raina’s close friend and boss Neel is gay and suffers heartbreak after his boyfriend gets married to a woman. Former professor at a University in France, Benoit has a sad past. His student cum boyfriend committed suicide. Raina introduces Benoit to Neel and the latter recruits in his cafe.

Shab Movie Review
Shab Movie Review

Shab Movie Review: Script Analysis

How far can you go to chase your dreams? Fulfil your desires? Your aspirations? How desperate can you become exactly? What if you fail? This is a story of dreams, ambition, love and lust. It deals with the crisis of 5-6 people who are somehow related to each other.

A story of unusual and complicated relationships written by Merle Kröger and Onir gets even more complex as the film proceeds. It leaves the viewer with a lot of unanswered questions.

While we all know modelling as a profession associated with glamour and limelight, the film exposes the viewer to its the darker side.

Shab Movie Review: Star Performance

Raveena Tandon is excellent as usual. She never fails to impress! She is the powerful, dominating Sonal who makes sure to get what she wants but that’s just the outer cover. She has her own set of crises, her failure to make the marriage work, her frustration. Tandon steals the show in the film!

Arpita Chatterjee is very natural and spontaneous as Raina. The actress needs to let go of her Bengali accent although she delivers a lot of dialogues in Bengali. This is the second time Arpita and Raveena are coming together after their Bengali film Laboratory (2010) although the duo don’t share much screen space in this one.

Ashish Bisht as Mohan/Afzar perfectly gets into his character and emotes his dilemma, his desperation and his helplessness.

Simon Frenay puts up a decent performance as Benoit.

Areesz Ganddi is impressive as Neel.

Sanjay Suri is seen in a cameo as Raveena’s husband Vivek Modi.

Shab Movie Review: Direction, Music

Onir has always ventured into a zone where not every filmmaker would dare to. While his 2005 flick My Brother…Nikhil dealt with same sex relationship, his National Award-winning 2010 movie I Am included topics like child abuse, sperm donation and gay rights. His latest release Shab deals with an unusual relationship between an elderly woman and a young guy among several other straight and gay relationships.

The film creates a suspense, several mysteries and makes the viewer impatient to find the answers. However the narrative is not very strong and there are several times when you are bound to get confused. Too many cooks spoil the broth, too many complications make the film boring. But there is an interesting twist to the tale in the end!

The film is especially slow and dragged. The duration is not very long but it could have been shorter. There are certain scenes which are unintentionally funny.

I liked the background score by Mithoon and the songs O saathi sung by Arijit Singh and Awaari sung by the composer himself.

Shab Movie Review: The Last Word

This is not a family entertainer or a film which everyone would like to watch. But if you are enthusiastic about stories dealing with the complexities of relationships in the urban life and can sit through boring films then you might like this.

 Shab Movie Trailer

Shab Movie releases on 14th July, 2017.

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