Dhobi Ghat : A Slammer

The subsequent tapping of fingers on the frets, floating from Majors to Minors, sets up the mood and suddenly santoor jams in. You could feel the inflation of words is unbuttoning her device, to give away her flesh and rage of hormone to the ever masculine build up of acoustics. And then suddenly the lunatic guitarist strums the six of them all. Mood breaks, all that you had guessed about the proceeding gets crushed, and cuts to a scene where you see your expectations, arrogance, self-pride and your Hippocratic sensualities are not matching the reel. You sense there was enough dirt in the sleeves wrapping up your kinky and suspect-prone heart. Dhobi Ghat has just slammed that on the concrete. Yes Dhobi Ghat is more of an uninterrupted documentary course of your own introspection, than a regular movie.

Mumbai, the city that proudly says the stroke of 10 P.M as the occurrence of its evening, has been a canvas of many film makers over the years. The economic capital has so much to it, that each time you discover something new about this place. A city, where a Dhobi (Munna-Prateik) in daylight could be a rat killer at night, a married female outsider (Yasmin- Kriti-Malhotra) who once came here to build a sweet married life like any one, but ends up being cheated and loosing hope in her life ultimately suicides. Contiguously an old lady who perhaps got the shock of her life, still resisted it and persisted to stay mum and moot to everything , reluctant to respond to any thing, whatever engaging that may be or a divorced man(Arun-Aamir) who changes his place here and there, cries with in himself, lives like an open book, urges water from the raindrops to make a peg of whisky in solitude, or an Newyork based investment banker(Shai-Monica Dogra) who may be named as shai, but ironically least shy among every one around her. Irony does not stop here, as Munna the “door to door” washed clothe servant wears a T-shirt portraying the English rock band “The doors”, and seeing that shai says him “so you like doors”


Dhobi Ghat is an introspection of a person, who lives a big city life. A big city demands a lot from you, can also return a lot too, or may take away everything from you that you extracted from here. Given you don’t change with the city like a Yasmin. Here bulk could mean nothing valuable or little could mean huge. Munna safely keeps all his income inside cassette place holder and drags his softest door cover before going to sleep. Just to differ, Kiran Rao shows that in between all the gigantic Ganesh idols, the smallest of them all, is not fated to immersion. Every time you guess something, about a certain scene recollecting from your other movie experience or from your personal experience, on the contrary it wraps up to something different. Kiran as a director continuously humiliates the experience of a pro-movie audience.

Take for an example, in that scene when Munna changes his clothes in his cagey room after taking the shower near railway tracks. He drags his short up and you feel like camera is going naughty here, but no. You end up seeing a blue inner already inside!

Then, the daughter of that servant who used to work in Yasmin’s house, denies displaying her English speaking skill, though she had said a while ago that she studies in an English medium school. As an educated audience you laugh on her, guessing the little black fat child’s inability in speaking English. And, then suddenly she smartly a belts out a chunk of Alfred lord Tennyson’s famous poem “The Brook”. At the very end of the movie, you feel like Munna is about to propose his love to shai when he runs past a heavy traffic road of Mumbai, and he does the exact opposite. Like a responsible lad who keeps his word by bringing back the original color of the customers clothing even if he had done the damage, gives away Arun’s new address to shai, thinking they are best fit for each other. You could feel a Dhobi like Munna, is stronger in his heart than you, and has a more advanced knowledge about reality of future.

literally every scene is connected to each other. for example, Arun making a peg of whiskey from rain water is compared with Munna's struggle to store the raindrops in a bowl, trickling down from the roof top of his house.

Arun, the lonely painter, could feel the loneliness of Yasmin, he cries for her ill fated life. A divorced man who says Mumbai is his muse, his wh*re too, suddenly finds a muse in Yasmin. Shai on the other hand, is keener on having Arun again on bed. Like a voyeur she fixes her camera on Arun’s doing, though Munna takes the other side of coin from shai. Munna builds up love for shai, but does not quite gather enough guts to say the three word sentence. Murder of his brother Salim in gang fight brings Munna back on ground of reality. He runs away from Shai’s company. Though Shai ultimately catches Munna, and hugs him to bid adieu.

Is shai still just a friend to Munna? Well you think so. But as Munna leaves shai, giving that piece of paper where Arun’s address is written, Shai breaks in tears.

A story which started with concentrating different molecule of characters in one single unit suddenly starts to break away in pieces. Dhobi Ghat is boring if you expect spice out of it, as it does not hurry up showing anything out of false reality. It’s what you get in real, but you don’t like to see it, are shown in reel. Dhobi Ghat lashed a bad stroke on each of them. I don’t know if I am getting too much excited and letting Mr. Ray down, but after watching DG I felt some one form India has scratched on his work, if not touched it.