Ek Chalis Ki Last Local: Review

At last, someone has tried to copy the spirit of Tarantino's cinema, rather than the scenes verbatim. Sanjay Gupta could learn a lesson or three from his namesake, debutante director Sanjay Khanduri. He pays tribute to a host of movies, ranging from Tarantino's own Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (it even manages to do both tributes in a single shot), to Natural Born Killers, Oldboy, DDLJ, Gireftaar and even pays homage to Nana Patekar and Rajnikanth.

The story reads a bit like Chameli, about a young man stuck in the night who accosts a call-girl. But that's where the similarities end, and the creatures of the night step out. This has got to be the wierdest (and one of the greatest) set of characters in a desi movie ever - whores, gamblers, pimps, serial killers, encounter cops - you name them and you got them here. I mean, a Nana Patekar-like autowallah, a friend resembling the protagonist of Oldboy, a trigger-happy couple roaming around in a cab akin to Natural Born Killers, the Rajni-cop persona from Gireftaar / Andha Kanoon, the mob-men in the car whose gun accidentally goes off (Pulp Fiction) and shoots off the ear of a guy (Reservoir Dogs) - great characters, and tributes galore. Yeah - this is certainly my kind of cinema. And wait, there's a lot more, but giving away more details would destroy the movie for you.

What I didn't like: the whole rona-dhona bit about how Neha became a call-girl 'coz of her ailing mom, and I felt that the editing could have been a lot more crisper. Also, though it was certainly courageous of Abhay to accept this role, and he pulls it off rather well too, he still does look very effeminate in certain scenes, and he has to cut that out pronto. However, that said, he does deserve full credit for understanding and lending support to such a whacked-out screenplay.

Go watch this now, and let's hope new filmmakers like this emerge in regional language films as well (especially in Malayalam cinema!).