Chetna Review

This Aitraaz-inspired orgy of sleaze is quite the usual B-grade (or should I say Z-grade) bare-it-all and beat records sorta flick. Though the main course is predictable, there is a weak pretence of a plot and the vague semblance of acting thrown in to keep up the charade.

Chetna (Payal Rohatgi) is a ruthless business tycoon who stubbornly keeps ethics out of the boardroom, and the bedroom. She’s the power-hungry over-ambitious head of Chetna Industries, who will stop at nothing to get the better of her archrival, Mittal And Mittal.

To Chetna, blackmailing one of her executives, Sameer (Jatin Grewal), to sleep with her, means no more than a nightcap before going to bed. To make affairs more interesting, Sameer is married to Aastha (Navneet Kaur), a dutiful, doting wife, who swiftly leaves Sameer and joins Mittal as an executive when she gets a whiff of her husband’s infidelity. Her aim in life fits remarkably well with the mission of her new employer - ruin Chetna, ruin Chetna, and, most importantly, ruin Chetna.

The one-up, one-down counterplotting continues until Chetna finds to her dismay that Sameer has all the while been gathering evidence against her. The twist in the tale is that Aastha and Sameer are working in tandem, so Sameer’s bewafaayee is all but forgotten (never mind that he starts feeling guilty only after the good sex is over).

Chetna is used to getting her own way and cannot tolerate this back-stabbing. Eager to end the humiliation, she eats cyanide and dies. Unfortunately, she gets this bright idea only at the end of the movie.

Payal Rohatgi as Chetna is unbelievably staid and looks like a cross between a telly-vamp (make-up) and a Sherawat-wannabe (skimpier-than-imaginable bikinis). And if her skirts are itsy, bitsier still are Navneet Kaur’s blouses. (Her pallu, like her on-screen hubby’s zipper, just doesn’t stay put). In the few scenes where either heroine wears any clothes at all, they’re in plain bad taste - pink leopard-print tights on Navneet Kaur is an atrocity that undermines the impact of the titillating flick. Jatin Grewal looks helpless a lot, especially when being seduced, which, we are led to believe, is good acting.

But hey, what’s all this fuss about good acting, good dialogues and good plot anyway? Chetna, being truly hatke, has none of these, instead drenching us in a voluptuous downpour of fantasy-fulfilling sex play and skin show. This being a low-budget movie, they don’t waste time on unimportant things that take up screen time, and most of the niche audience appreciates this subtlety.

Another novelty is seeing Navneet Kaur in the role of a ‘pativrata patni’. Even the gods in heaven couldn’t have imagined her in such a role after her string of bootylicious babe appearances in various Telugu movies.

The background music has been intelligently replaced by moans and groans, which, for the most part, fits on-screen events to a T. More ways to save money – good going, producers. Why bust out mellifluous tunes when the audience is visually, ahem, preoccupied?

If you thought Timepass was great cinema, or Sherni Ka Shikaar was the pinnacle of big-screen entertainment, then head for the nearest theater. But on the whole, this one is avoidable unless you’re in the mood for a tasteless skin flick.