"A small-town girl, Mumtaz, who lost everything and then more when she came to Mumbai - her hope and time."
Chandni Bar is honestly a sheer Bollywood masterpiece by Madhur Bhandarkar. The story captures how the dirty underbelly of crime-ridden Mumbai from the 1980s overlaps with a dance bar that serves alcohol - Chandni Bar. With the constant and overlapping idea of "hope leading to despair" being employed throughout the movie, you can honestly never guess just what route is being taken. The cast is simply brilliant.
Sisterhood among the ladies at Chandni Bar:
Something genuinely exceptional about this movie is how the ladies at Chandni Bar behave. When off the stage, they're a legit sorority who bring so much to the table individually. Each one has a dark and painful past, building upon the connotation that working at the Bar was not a choice, but the last resort. From hearing each other's sad tales to enjoying their backstage banter to accepting reality, there's a sense of morbid innocence within the workers at the bar. Their circumstances or bad choices brought them here, and most have accepted that they're going nowhere. The emphasis on their sisterhood is essential as, without this sense of community, I can't imagine them being able to live in the situation they find themselves in. One of my favorite scenes from the movie was when they went out just for a fun day out in Mumbai.
Tabu is literally a goddess:
I've loved her roles throughout several movies, be them as the heroine or the villainess. Her brilliance genuinely shines at such roles that have her at crossroads and in the grey area. After not having slept with anyone for years, when it came to the worst-case scenario, she went and did what she never wanted to, and that too, a number of times. Her character arc is painful, as goes through the ebbs and troughs of life. This was all about her as a character, later we'll look at things with her as the narrator. The way she portrayed her different emotions as she morphed as a person, whilst still maintaining her core principles was brilliant.
A crime-ridden perspective of Mumbai.
The movie is primarily set in the 1980s through to the late 90s. These were some of the darkest ages within Mumbai. From rampant smuggling of everything and everyone to crime lords controlling the city at all levels, Mumbai was a different city from today. Chandni Bar brilliantly covers the dirty underbelly and showcases it first-hand. The seamless nature of events that would look so out of place, yet uncannily fitting was almost jarring. From the people who visit the bar, their actions, and the people related to those people, we get to see an intricate web of selfish yet ambitious gangsters and businessmen trying to unethically make their place in the world.
The unbridled brilliance of having the main character narrate their own story:
This is the point where we get some of the most iconic lines in the entire movie. There's a subtle art to the narration. It can either make the movie or break it. Especially when the main character is narrating their own events, you have the slightest of hopes that they will definitely turn everything around. That the characters in turmoil are just about to make the breakthrough that sorts them out.
Life goes on:
Chandni Bar is a hope-killing movie. The different people that the viewer is introduced to go through their own lives as Tabu's moves forth. There are troubles, friendships, marriages, betrayals, murders and so many more trials that both, Tabu and the other characters go through. The greatest part about this is that storylines are timelines that keep progressing, even if we can't see them personally. This touch of cinematographic brilliance shines through when we see Mumtaz be isolated from the troubling life of working at Chandni Bar and how those around him had kept moving on.
Chandni Bar is a special movie. Every aspect of the story feels necessary and the essence of the film sticks with the viewer. By taking up morbid sections of society and combining them with a well-executed story, Chandni Bar ironically sets its characters on a stage where they dance towards their demise.
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