Udta Punjab Revisited : An overhyped anthology tale which doesn't impress.

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More than an hour into Abhishek Chaubey's Udta Punjab, a Bihari girl (Alia Bhatt) and a Jatt boy (Shahid Kapoor) cross paths. They're running from someone: perhaps from themselves, he suspects. Both of them are at the crossroads, in danger of being swept away. They break down and confide in each other as perfect strangers. There's a fear for everybody, and nobody, in their eyes. And then they're torn apart, but not before falling in love.

 Love, for them, at that moment, was just being able to be heard. It isn't romantic; it's desperate, and needed, and far from horrible. Even her hard kiss on his lips, an organic extension of her meltdown, is because "those monsters did everything but *this* to me." This line, in Bhatt's quivering voice, suggests the kind of 'ugliness' that no living mainstream actress would dare to embody. He then becomes the knight in shining armour who must rescue her from an evil tower. She has become his drug in five short minutes.

 If one somehow overlooks the accessories - that she is an impoverished Bihari girl being held as a heroin-addled sex slave, and he is a brash Punjabi pop star (Tommy Singh, aka "Gabru") who has built his debauched career on the back of 'cool' drug glorification - theirs is a match made in heaven. They don't seem like the kind of characters that merit a happy ending; an end, perhaps, give the way they've been sucked to the bone and back.

 You can sense the makers' hearts breaking, as they dig deeper and harder into a world none of us wish we knew about. They're enjoying expressing themselves, but this isn't the kind of achievement they can shout out from rooftops about - much like a bittersweet, guilt-tinged victory over your best friend in a tournament final. It feels a bit unfair that its artistic merit may forever be transcended by the sheer heft and consequences of its subject.

 Earlier on, when Tommy is locked up in jail, two boys inside combine flawlessly to sing him his own explicit song. "Imagined your face when we first injected," they boast proudly, with the glee of squires assuring their King of undying loyalty. They've just murdered their mother to steal money for another fix. All Tommy can do is gape at them, wondering how and when he had acquired a legion of intoxicated killers.

 A damning epiphany.
If ever there was one.

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