Pune Highway Gets Our attention Without Being Pushy 

Pune Highway Gets  Our attention Without Being Pushy 

Rating: ***

Bugs Bhargava Krishna and  Rahul da Cunha’s  Pune Highway is  hard to slot, and even harder to explain. It is a murder mystery, yes. Although the definition of a mystery is  not easily applicable to the first murder  where three lifelong  friends, chaddhi buddies if you will, sit in a car watching their fourth friend clobbered to death by goons. They make  no effort to save  the friend.This is murder by decree.

 There and then, we know  there are fissures among these friends that need  serious attending  to. Krishna  and  da Cunha’s film, based on the latter’s oft-staged play, steers clear  of solution and denouements.  It  piles on the problems in the trio’s relationship dynamics, without  clutching  at any hope of a closure.

Yes, these guys  are a mess.And the presence of Natasha(Manjari Fadnis) as the fourth spoke in the creaky wheel doesn’t help the guys to calm down. Natasha is a  shipwreck among the trainwreck of inter-relationships that run through the jigsaw puzzle  of  a plot where some pieces remain missing till the  end, as they are won’t to in life.

Pune Highway doesn’t offer  neat closures to the  quirky conundrum of  boundary-less relationships  among friends who don’t seem to believe in  giving one  another space. They discuss their scatological  and  sex lives  in the same  breath amidst  wild cackles and hisses.

No,  boys will be   boys is  not  the explanation. Not here.

Complicating their already-messy equation is Mona, an underage  libertine, played not too gracefully  by Ketaki Narayan, and really  the  nose-ring to  depict  an absence of  boundaries,  is  not the most subtle of devices.

Mona, in some  vital ways, holds the key to  this  kink-dom. She  is  the  privileged daughter of a powerful politician(Shishir Mishra,as usual in control  of  an underwritten  part) with more than a passing  interest  in dating  much older men.

The  co-directors throw  any number of red herrings  about Mona’s mal(e)practices.

  The film has  quite a  number of interesting characters , none more so than Pethe(Sudeep Modak) a lisping blundering cop whom you  would  hardly take seriously. But the  man knows his  job . He is  also putty in his two little  daughters’ hands  who use him as a  model for their makeup talents while he attends calls  about a  mutilated corpse.

 There is  an interesting  sequence where Pethe rushes  out of home to  attend to his job with nailpolish on his  fingers. I would  like  a  whole series based on the adventures  of  Inspector Pethe , his daughters   and  his assistant  Godbole .

 As  for the  three  ‘life-wrong’  friends, Amit Sadh, Jim Sarbh and Anubhav Pal play various degrees  of grey with  understanding.  However one  of them with his penchant for porn and snuff movies deserves serious help. He is  not getting it here.