User Reviews

Finding a good movie is like looking for a good food, you have to know your taste buds. This is a delightfull movie but for the content which is gut-wrenching. Manisha Koirala, is an underestimated actress who thrives in the portrayal of a prostitute in the Bazzar (Market). The script is written by the characters that we see in the inner sanctums of decadent society of corrupt law and legal System. Like "Haasil," another down to the core movie that parlays the inner cities this movie exposes the ruthless atrocities unabashedly with real dialect and acting. The movie does not waste time on mundane stuff but comes with a message that is so blunt that keeps you thinking and admiring for the courage to bring to the surface the ills of the Society that should be cured not band-aided.

Would you like to know about a women oriented film targeted only towards the male audience? That exactly is Market - A film dealing with prostitution that neither has the realistic feel of Madhur Bhandarkar's Chandni Bar nor the sensitivity of Gulzar's Mausam or Shyam Benegal's Mandi. In fact it makes zero sense in comparing Market to such classic masterpieces, for the only films you could relate Market to are those exploitative Z graders targeted towards the lower stall masses.

Would you like to know about the unstable storyline that constantly bounces between prostitution, underworld, romance and revenge? Would you like to know about the sleazy screenplay that's stuffed with Hyderabad's brothels, Mumbai's dance bars and Dubai's Don dens? OK just for formal detailing here it goes. Supposedly inspired from a real-life story, the film dodges round Muskaan (Manisha Koirala) – an under-aged girl, forcibly married off to a Sheikh who sexually abuses and subsequently divorces her. As Bollywood luck would have it, Muskaan is forced into prostitution at a Hyderabad brothel. Meanwhile she's simultaneously fighting her case of marital torture against the Sheikh for eight long years, but in vain. Further she's forced to leave Hyderabad when the brothel is raided. Destination next? Mumbai obviously, where she upgrades herself to an upper class call girl, thanks to a coworkers Lisa (Suman Ranganathan) and Isha (Shweta Menon). Divert to Dubai, where the girls lure an underworld bhai (Govind Namdeo) through latka jhatkas. The trauma progresses in the contrived climax with Muskaan wreaking revenge on the Sheikh. The point where the movie deviates from its contemporaries like Chandni Bar is in the director's inability to smoothly develop the proceedings of the screenplay. For instance, Muskaan's transformation from a Hyderabadi prostitute to a sophisticated call girl is least convincing. Jaiprakash's direction lacks the hard-hitting punch required for an unusual theme he opts for.

What more? Would you like to know about Masood and Meeraq Mirza's dialogues that offer nothing new other than repetitive abusing that induce more cheap whistles than claps? Would you like to know about Altaf Raja's ear-jarring garbage that's termed as music, inflicting mental anguish on the listeners? Would you like to know about Thomas. A. Xavier's cinematography that's consistently devoid of lighting effects? Would you like to know about the editing that's conspicuous by its very absence?

Want more? Would you like to know about Makrand Deshpande hamming in his underdeveloped character of Kaalia Anthony? Would you like to know about talented actors like Sayaji Shinde and Govind Namdeo who go overboard? Would you like to know about the uniformly amateurish performances by Suman Rangnathan and Shweta Menon in their South Indian accented dubbed voices? Would you like to know about the screeching Manisha Koirala who is off lately following the Mithun Chakravarthy path of C-grade masala movies? (Ek Choti Si Love Story, Jaani Dushman, Escape From Taliban and obviously this one to name a few)

Would you still like to know about this Market where everything on sale is rotten?

Let me start with a message to director Jay Prakash and the production team of Market: Script! Script! Script! Let me say that one more time, a bit more verbosely--Pay Attention to the Script! That's a kind of public service message, in the off chance that Prakash and his crew read this (unfortunately, Bollywood and Bollywood fans seem to have paid relatively little attention to IMDb so far).

Market is ostensibly about prostitution rackets in India, but it really ends up being the story of a particular prostitute, Muskaan Bana (Manisha Koirala). But you wouldn't know that from the beginning of the film, which seems like it's about a young woman named Neela. Neela met a man who eloped with her and married her. It was really a ruse, as he takes her to Hyderabad to visit his "aunt", who turns out to be the madam of a large whorehouse. His intention was actually just to sell the woman to the Madam. It seems that in India--at least in the India of this film--prostitution is something more like slavery (but more on that later).

The first 20 minutes to half hour of the film is the story of Neela and Neela's brother, who is trying to get her out of the whorehouse after he receives a tip from Muskaan that Neela is there. Oddly, Neela and her brother are just dropped after this, never to be heard from again. That's indicative of script problems that recur throughout the film.

At any rate, Market then becomes (roughly) the tale of Muskaan. We learn of how she was married off by her father to a sheikh, because the sheikh was offering a substantial sum of money, upward mobility in terms of class, and because it would increase the likelihood that Muskaan's father's other daughters would find upper class suitors, as well. But the sheikh married Muskaan just for sex. He repeatedly rapes her during her only week with him, before she returns home. This leads to tragedy with Muskaan's family, they try to sue the sheikh, and on and on. Eventually Muskaan ends up in Mumbai working for a pimp named Juicy, ridiculously enough, and Market becomes something of a mob/revenge film.

I'm leaving out an awful lot of details in the above, and not just because I want to avoid giving away important plot points. Rather, the film is so stream-of-consciousness and sprawling that it would take way more than the allotted 1000 words to try to relay just the basics of the plot, and even then, it still wouldn't seem very coherent to a reader.

Maybe more so than any other film I've seen, most of Market seems like Prakash and crew simply made it up on the fly. At times, early in the film, it plays like a collection of shorts based around a whorehouse. That probably wouldn't have been a bad idea if they had stuck with that.

Even after it first becomes clear that this is going to be the story of Muskaan instead of Neela or a collection of different character portraits, Muskaan ends up disappearing for long periods of time while we focus on newer characters in different settings. There's really never an end to the introduction of new characters who are important to the plot. At one point I lost track of them, but I decided not to worry, because I knew the characters mentioned wouldn't be in the film for long--another set would be introduced, the last set dropped. I turned out to be correct.

Given that, then, it's maybe surprising that on a close-focus (or "trees") level, the writing is pretty good, aside from occasionally hokey dialogue (not helped by the English translation, which regularly does odd things like translate Hindi for "do you understand?" as "Do you dig it?" or just "Dig?"--I guess the translator was an old hippie). It's also surprising by the time we get to the last half hour (the film is about 2.5 hours), a few threads are reintroduced and nicely wrapped-up--like they finally figured out basic screen writing by that point. At times, it seems like maybe the script was supposed to be a bit experimental (again, the collection of different character studies would have been that, especially for Bollywood), but if so, why was it so potboiler in other respects? It needed to go one way or the other.

Instead of blaming the script, we could also blame the editing. Prakash could have cut out large chunks of the film and assembled the remaining pieces into something more coherent and unified. On the other hand, the film would have only been 80-90 minutes long, and coming from Bollywood, that's probably too radical.

Before I run out of room, hasn't it struck anyone that a lot of problems depicted in Indian films are the result of treating women (and to an extent men, also) as property and/or an investment? The women in Market are all treated like property and no one seems to notice. It just doesn't strike anyone, including the women themselves, that they have minds and wills, and that they could decide what to do with their own lives (including deciding to be a prostitute). And it's not just Bollywood's comment on prostitution. Most other Bollywood films treat women the same way--apparently, this has some truth in Indian culture. Most of the problems would be solved if people were allowed to think for themselves and make and stick to unpopular or unusual decisions about how to live their lives.

All the standard stuff in Market is pretty good--the acting is okay, the music is good, the production design is nice, the women are certainly attractive (although there is no nudity or sex despite the subject matter), there is some admirable cinematography, and so on. This could have been a very good to excellent film if it had had a good script.

MARKET's subject matter and premise remind you of CHANDNI BAR to a certain extent. A lot of the reviews have said that the former falls so short of the latter in terms of brilliance and intellectual content. My personal opinion is that both are average films with totally different approaches to film-making. They have two things in common: they are films about prostitutes and both seemed quite unimpressive to me.

MARKET starts off as a social drama on the plight of women in the red-light area in Hydrebad and ends up as a mafia-revenge picture. The director, Jai Prakash obviously wanted to increase the commercial appeal of the film, which might be the reason for the sudden shifts in plot. It is really three films rolled into one. Perhaps with a better script and a gutsy director (a rare endangered species in Bollywood) if a film was made about one of the three, then we might have something to watch out for.

But the performances for the most part are decent, with Manisha once again doing a good job. And to the film's credit there are some sequences which have some novelty to them and have been well done. But just not enough of them to make it a good film on the whole. 6/10.