The film is a period piece focusing on the Indian porn industry.
By Tathagata Mitra
BANGALORE: Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s ‘Miss Lovely’, a multiple award winning period piece on the C-grade (porn) film industry, has been released in Seattle, and is set to be screened in other cities through the month.
Having premiered in Cannes in 2012, the film got its commercial release in India in January of this year.
Miss Lovely released in Seattle on June 6. It will be shown in New York, San Jose and Los Angeles on June 20, and Chicago and Austin, onJune 27. The director, Ashim Ahluwalia, is currently in the US promoting his film on the underbelly of the film industry. The film also starred Niharika Singh and Anil George.
Miss Lovely was honoured with National Film Award – Special Jury Award (Feature film) and Best Production Design at the 61st National Film Awards. The film was a part of the competition for Un Certain Regard at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and International Film Festival, Rotterdam among various others.
Miss Lovely is the story of two brothers, Vicky (Anil) and Sonu Duggal (Nawazuddin) who produce sex-horror films in the 1980s. They have a tumultuous relationship. Things get worse when Sonu gets attracted to a young woman named Pinky (Niharika) which eventually completes his journey into self-destruction.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote that, “Miss Lovely sets out to prove that Indian cinema can be as frustratingly opaque as a European art movie [and] succeeds rather too well.”
Variety’s Alissa Simon, however, wrote that “Something new in Indian filmmaking, neither Bollywood nor traditional art cinema, the pic provides a unique, immersive experience…one that owes as much to docu and experimental filmmakers as to Scorsese, Welles and von Sternberg, plunging viewers into the characters’ social milieu.”
Film Comment’s Gavin Smith considered it the best entry in the Un Certain Regard section writing, “I hope we do hear more from Indian director Ashim Ahluwalia, whose lively, fast-and-loose Miss Lovely, about two brothers toiling in the world of Bollywood B-movie and softcore porn production in the Eighties, had an off-kilter, at times delirious first hour and then settled into a pungent story of jealousy, betrayal, and doomed love.”
Miss Lovely was not the only entry for Nawazuddin at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. His collaboration with Anurag Kashyap, Gangs of Wasseypur, also received critical acclaim at the same film festival.