Meet the most recent avatar of Maa Kali! The fascist avenging woman has always been a favorite figure of fantasy fashioning for our films. Who can forget Nargis gunning down her own son in Mehboob Khan’s “Mother India”?
The motivations for revenge in “Hate Story” don't seem to be quite those that impelled the girl protagonist to get up in arms in “Mother India” or for that matter in “Bhavna”, a movie directed by “Hate Story” producer Vikram Bhatt’s father Pravin Bhatt, where Shabana Azmi killed her own husband.
Really, who needs a gun to get even if you could have sex?
Paoli doesn’t give a damn if her bare back or flesh flash around the screen. She displays a healthy attitude of disdain for the camera, letting it swoop down on her vulture style, never allowing her vengeful character’s erotic journey to get sleazy, cheesy or lurid. The camera violates her character’s privacy together with her consent.
“Hate Story” is a tale that invites provocative measures of counter-argument. When the protagonist Kaavya (Paoli Dam) gets all the way down to revenge, she spares no one, least of all herself. She announces she desires to be a sex worker, and thereafter, there’s no looking back.
And quite a comely back it is.
Paoli’s Kaavya uses her physique to lure her enemy into her trap. Director Vivek Agnihotri cuts into her journey of self-destructive vendetta like a knife.
The episodes sometimes stretch the boundaries of belief. But what the heck! No person is creating a statement here at the politically correct conduct of the Indian woman.
In what can also be considered one of the vital defiantly unconventional debut performances, Paoli lets herself go together with the furious flow of her character’s vendetta.
The episodes hammer into each other with scarce room to respire. The pace is dizzy a number of the way. And when it slows down, you're feeling the protagonist’s vendetta is losing its steam.
Steamy lovemaking scenes are strewn around the narrative’s stricken landscape. The soundtrack suggests there’s an urgent tragedy nudging the erotic content. The dialogues by Rohit Malhotra don’t turn away from telling it love it is.
Vikram Bhatt’s screenplay is Sidney Sheldon territory. It doesn’t shrink back from showing the heroine in an unflattering light. That is new-age cinema with out a room for conventional narrative devices or apologies for what the protagonist sets out to do.
If in ‘The Dirty Picture’, Vidya Balan wore her sexuality on her sleeve, in ‘Hate Story’, Paoli uses her sexuality like a favoured currency within the stock market.
Mint-fresh and shock-proof, Paoli interprets her character with vigorous conviction. As her adversary Gulshan Devaiah (so watchable in “Shaitan” and “That Girl In Yellow Boots”) careens between rage and anguish quite effortlessly.
“Hate Story” isn't quite the story of the simpering wronged woman we’ve been seeing in our films for the reason that time Adam impregnated Eve.
“Hate Story” pushes the envelope so hard, the entire contents spill out in a torrential tumble of tantalising power-play set inside the world of corporate battles and gender conflicts.
This is a most riveting and aesthetic saga of a woman’s revenge against the person who’s wronged her since R.K. Nayyar’s “Inteqaam” — apart from the truth that Paoli does things Sadhana in Nayyar’s film will have never imagined. – IANS
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