Fashion

Meghna comes from a small city and wants to be a model. Her father objects and she goes anyway. In Mumbai the first jobs are small; backstage, catalogue shoots, waiting. Then an agency takes her and things speed up. Advertisements, covers, shows. Meghna reaches the top. She falls just as fast; the contract ends, the phone stops ringing, the drugs come in. The name rising in the business is somebody else now. Meanwhile Shonali, whom she met at the top, has hit bottom and is living on the street. Madhur Bhandarkar directs. Priyanka Chopra, Kangana Ranaut, Mugdha Godse and Arjan Bajwa are in the cast. It is an Indian production. Priyanka Chopra won the national film award for best actress for this part, and Kangana Ranaut was awarded in a supporting role. The matter it treats is an industry consuming people; the film means to describe the fashion world from inside. It was made with people from the real fashion world and the show sequences are at real scale. The narrative is inclined to moralise and some passages read like a warning. Shonali is the hardest line in the film and the real pain of it is there. The narrative punishes its main character and then forgives her, and that structure was argued over. The film found a wide audience in India and enlarged the argument about the fashion world. The ending closes on a return. Its limit is length; the narrative is long, there are stock characters, and the message is too plain. Who it is for: viewers who like industry stories and drama built on performance. Who it is not for: it is long, didactic, and the ending predictable.