Bugs Bhargava Krishna and Rahul da Cunha’s Pune Highway is hard to slot, and even harder to explain. It is a murder mystery, yes. Although the definition of a mystery is not easily applicable to the first murder where three lifelong friends, chaddhi buddies if you will, sit in a car watching their fourth friend clobbered to death by goons. They make no effort to save the friend. This is murder by decree.
There and then, we know there are fissures among these friends that need serious attending to. Krishna and da Cunha’s film, based on the latter’s oft-staged play, steers clear of solution and denouements. It piles on the problems in the trio’s relationship dynamics, without clutching at any hope of a closure.
Yes, these guys are a mess. And the presence of Natasha (Manjari Fadnis) as the fourth spoke in the creaky wheel doesn’t help the guys to calm down. Natasha is a shipwreck among the trainwreck of inter-relationships that run through the jigsaw puzzle of a plot where some pieces remain missing till the end, as they are won’t to in life.
Pune Highway doesn’t offer neat closures to the quirky conundrum of boundary-less relationships among friends who don’t seem to believe in giving one another space. They discuss their scatological and sex lives in the same breath amidst wild cackles and hisses.
No, boys will be boys is not the explanation. Not here.
Complicating their already-messy equation is Mona, an underage libertine, played not too gracefully by Ketaki Narayan, and really the nose-ring to depict an absence of boundaries, is not the most subtle of devices.
Mona, in some vital ways, holds the key to this kink-dom. She is the privileged daughter of a powerful politician (Shishir Mishra, as usual in control of an underwritten part) with more than a passing interest in dating much older men.
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The co-directors throw any number of red herrings about Mona’s mal(e)practices.
The film has quite a number of interesting characters, none more so than Pethe (Sudeep Modak) a lisping blundering cop whom you would hardly take seriously. But the man knows his job. He is also putty in his two little daughters’ hands who use him as a model for their makeup talents while he attends calls about a mutilated corpse.
There is an interesting sequence where Pethe rushes out of home to attend to his job with nail polish on his fingers. I would like a whole series based on the adventures of Inspector Pethe, his daughters and his assistant Godbole.
As for the three ‘life-wrong’ friends, Amit Sadh, Jim Sarbh and Anubhav Pal play various degrees of grey with understanding. However, one of them with his penchant for porn and snuff movies deserves serious help. He is not getting it here.
