Seems that the age old debatable question “Can a boy and a girl be just friends?†will now get precedenced by “Can a boss and his subordinate (read muse) maintain both love and work relationships alongside?†This movie deals with the complexities of such a relationship with the focus on harassment in the workplace. Again, this so called harassment has been given two perspectives – one of the male boss who considers his eventual stance of non-cooperation, snide and improper remarks as getting back and flirting respectively, and the other of the female subordinate (at high post) who considers the aforesaid comments as insulting and non-cooperation as an attempt to curb her career. She also thinks that somewhere she is being pressurized to compromise with her dignity as well. An interesting observation that has been portrayed very well in this movie is – the same look, nudge and dialogue between the same duo holds poles apart meanings in two different situations, that is when they are in love by admittance and when they are not!
Now the question is – in our kind of society where very few women happen to reach powerful positions in cut throat corporate sectors and wherein ambitious plus woman does not equal to focus, hard work, struggle and sacrifice, but to most it equals to running away from basic womanly duties, indulge in merry making and overall have a selfish existence, what percentage of population will actually understand the pain and frustration of a senior woman executive being harassed by a boss whom she once loved? Very few actually. Hats off to the makers of this movie to still work upon such a project and that too without any item number or even normal song and dance sequence!
Sudhir Mishra has made a fine movie with a new age topic, sans any unnecessary sleaze and showing different perspectives of so called ‘workplace harassment’ starting from its cause and origin to its climax. The whole movie shuffles between past and present of seven year period and at times the chain of events gets little confusing. The end of the movie is also quite bizarre. The director has played with light maybe to denote past and present in the scenes, but in such type of movies where past forms most of the story narrative, continuity in the lighting is advisable. Otherwise, most of the times you feel that the lighting is inadequate. Casting of the supporting characters is superb and so is their costumes, body language, acting etc. Deepti Naval has done full justice to her character of a social worker. Kanwaljeet has a very short and passable role. Coming to the main protagonists, Arjun Rampal is experimenting with different roles and is succeeding as well! He is now a polished actor. Chitrangada Singh is lucky to get such screen space at the onset of her career and has managed good enough. But a lot more expressions could have used by her character.