Miss Lovely

Miss Lovely is a 2012 Indian drama film directed by Ashim Ahluwalia and set in the criminal depths of Mumbai's C-grade (horror and porn film) industry. Ahluwalia's debut feature follows the story of the Duggal brothers who produce sleazy sex-horror films in the mid-1980s. The plot explores the intense and mutually destructive relationship between younger sibling Sonu Duggal, played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and his elder brother, Vicky (Anil George). Sonu finds himself drawn to a mysterious young woman named Pinky (Niharika Singh) eventually leading to his downfall. Miss Lovely had its cinematic release on 17 January 2014 across 300 screens in India. The film won the Special Jury Award (Feature film) and Best Production Design Award at the 61st National Film Awards.

The stylized form, densely layered narrative, period costumes and production design simultaneously convey a pulp style and contemporaneous modernity. Jonathan Romney of Sight & Sound described the film as "A shock to the system – an Indian film like I’d never seen." The film constantly switches between genre pieces and is part hard-boiled film noir, part love story, part melodrama and part documentary. It has been compared to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express.

Shot on a combination of Kodak Super 16 and 35mm film in widescreen, the central themes of Miss Lovely include repressed sexuality, censorship, the deconstruction of genre, the material nature of celluloid and the extinction of cinema itself. The film soundtrack also links back to a history of past cinema, particularly the use of the rare work of Italian composers Egisto Macchi and Piero Umiliani, who had both scored exploitation films. The soundtrack also employs film scores by Indian composer Ilaiyaraaja and disco producer Biddu.

Miss Lovely competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The film has since screened at numerous film festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The project started as a documentary on C-grade sex cinema in the lower depths of Bollywood which flourished between the 1970s and the early 2000s when it was eventually made redundant by anonymous internet pornography. During work on the documentary, the director discovered that none of the subjects were willing to appear on camera as shooting pornography in India constitutes a serious criminal offense. The documentary was subsequently shelved. The project was later reworked into a feature film script and set in the past so as to protect the identities of individual subjects and their actual stories. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) gave an ‘A’ certification to the film.

Initial reviews to Miss Lovely at Cannes were contradictory. Expecting a more mainstream film, The Hollywood Reporter noted that "Miss Lovely sets out to prove that Indian cinema can be as frustratingly opaque as a European art movie [and] succeeds rather too well."

In complete contrast, Variety's Alissa Simon gave the film a glowing review, saying "Something new in Indian filmmaking, neither Bollywood nor traditional art cinema, the pic provides a unique, immersive experience...one that owes as much to docu and experimental filmmakers as to Scorsese, Welles and von Sternberg, plunging viewers into the characters' social milieu."

Sight & Sound's Jonathan Romney described the director Ashim Ahluwalia as "a very impressive talent, and given the oppressive conventions of the Indian film industry, he’s clearly an independent spirit and then some."