Plot

A Hindi feature film set in the lower depths of Bombay's "C" grade film industry. Miss Lovely follows the devastating story of two brothers who produce sleazy horror films in the mid-1980s.

An ornate hybrid bursting with pulp poetry, nihilistic doc-realism, and spectral atmospherics, Miss Lovely follows the lives of Vicky and Sonu Duggal, two brothers that produce "C" grade sleaze films in 1980s Bombay.

Based on the remnants of an abandoned documentary, Miss Lovely unfolds in the lower depths of Bollywood, a rat pit of savage opportunism, corruption, and lust, where the brothers churn out forbidden sex-horror films for India's small-town picture houses.

Skirting repressive state censorship, police persecution, and gangland distributors, cynical hustler Vicky struggles to run an impoverished operation. He leaves the donkey-work to Sonu, his withdrawn, barely verbal younger sibling, who occupies the lowest rung of the professional ladder, subservient even to the rag-tag crew that assembles for their sordid productions. Lonely and stifled, with no prospects other than the childlike desire to make a decent romantic film of his own someday, Sonu's rage festers under the surface.

Returning from a rural sales trip peddling erotic reels, Sonu encounters a mysterious beauty on the train home. She's only just arrived in Bombay and her helplessness soothes his own sense of despair. Her name is Pinky and she appears to be a struggling actress. Sonu is bewitched by Pinky's silent radiance. He knows that only she can save him; make his emptiness disappear. But the more time he spends with her, the less he understands her background and motives. Pinky remains a void, and yet, for Sonu, she's an image without which his life remains meaningless.

Obsessed and growing more and more resentful of his forceful brother, Sonu decides to liberate himself and produce the romantic film of his dreams, a reckless, nihilistic venture with no story and no crew in place. All he has is a title - the film will be called 'Miss Lovely' and Sonu will do whatever it takes to make it.

But nothing is what it seems in this garish underworld of shifting alliances, quivering flesh, and doomed love. Vicky, it appears, has plans for the mysterious girl too. Out on the streets many years later, Sonu realizes that his whole world has turned upside down. As paranoia spirals out of control, Sonu has no choice but to free himself from everything he's ever had.

With it's near cubist attitude, baroque self- reflexively and total disregard for genre conventions, Miss Lovely operates like a joyfully mutilated Bollywood parable, punctured by influences of the Japanese New Wave.

• By Cinematheque Francaise