Apparently Chameli's late director Anant Balani sold the idea for the film to Pritish Nandy, the producer, in one minute. That one idea of a brooding, rich banker finding himself spending a rainy night with a loud but magnetic hooker keeps the film going through its meandering, wafer-thin middle.
Aman Kapoor (Rahul Bose), a south Bombay-type investment banker, finds himself stranded with Chameli (Kareena Kapoor), a sex worker at a street corner, after his car breaks down on a rainy Bombay night. It is, of course, her regular haunt and slowly he gets a ringside view into a very different world from his own, one that brings him to the edge of his experience. The oddball characters that inhabit Chameli's life go in and out of that corner. There's a rich, young boy who wants to run away with a eunuch while his father is chasing him to get married a few days later. But the first half drags, with characters going in and out of the same space, basically revealing that the raspy Chameli is actually one of Bollywood's favourite bad girls—the golden-hearted prostitute.
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Chameli has been booked by her pimp for a powerful but AIDS-stricken politician, although she doesn't want to sleep with him and Kapoor tries to help her not to. The rest of the film slowly slips from one unnecessary incident to another. From creating an intimate crossing of two very different lives, Sudhir Mishra who stepped in to Balani's shoes hands some of the characters old Hindi film-style cops-and-robbers dialogue. Also, with most of the first half being shot in one location and most of the film over one night, it does get tedious and monotonous.
Chameli is billed as Kareena Kapoor's coming-of-age movie but she hams through a character that fills the movie. Bose is reliably good but given a short shrift. There's a good vibe between Bose and Kareena that makes the movie watchable. Although it's bogged down by too much sameness, the movie's look is refreshingly different in some scenes, like the one where Bose and Kareena talk after everything's over as night turns to morning at Marine Drive. The music is intimate. The movie too should have been that but faltered because of the pace and divergent subplots. Although the unspoken warmth of an odd relationship lingers even after the movie is over, in between, filmi confusion reigns.
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Courtesy: Film Information
