A lot of Miss Lovely is shot inside crummy corridors of seedy hotels, rundown offices and grubby clubs. The camera glides through these narrow and constricting walls, lingering on the dusty patterned carpets and the sooty lampshades. These long, narrow and dingy spaces in a way evoke the decaying and decrepit minds of the three characters at the centre of the film.

Two warring brothers, the girl with a past, a doomed love triangle... it’s the classic Hindi film story but Miss Lovely is anything but a Hindi film. At least not like we know it. And despite being about — and filmed like — the C-grade film industry of the 1980s, which thrived on the soft porn clips punctuating the movies, it is not C-grade schlock.

Miss Lovely is our very own Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilarating yarn about the porn film industry. Like in that 1997 epic, writer-director Ashim Ahluwalia doesn’t judge or sensationalise even as he blows the lid off India’s C-grade movie industry, replete with sex parties, casting couches and human trafficking.

That Ashim’s roots lie in documentary filmmaking and that he first set out to make a non-fiction film about the subject is evident in the way he uses the story just as an excuse to throw light on the industry which survived in the shadows of mainstream movies. The masala is all there — dreams, talent, fame, greed, envy mixing in a lethal cocktail — but used in a sparse, almost disenchanted fashion.

Vicky Duggal (Anil George) is the man producing the dirty pictures and selling them to clients who are nothing short of the underworld, ready to take heads off if they don’t get their supply of “schoolgirl” and “beauty parlour” videos. “Do ghante mein do hazaar jhatke,” Vicky proudly announces. “Kursi mein baithke bistar ka mazaa.”

The younger brother Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is the dreamer, who wants to emerge from this muck and make something artistic. “Aadmi ka ek level hona chahiye,” he mumbles. “Level nahin toh aadmi kya?” But despite his best intentions and efforts, he seems to get hurtled towards his brother’s smut trade every time.

Giving him fresh reason to break out is Pinky (Niharika Singh), the small-town girl with an innocent face and dreamy eyes. She seems far removed from the world of sleaze and the besotted Sonu promises to make a love story with her called Miss Lovely. But all he ends up doing is falling in love with the girl who turns out to be a better actress than he thought.

The magic of Miss Lovely is the constant battle between the subject and the treatment — to make “an A-grade film on C-grade films”! Ashim wants to stay true to the world of trashy films and yet create cinema that is original and unflinching. The flavour is distinctly arthouse with its heavy pacing and prolonged shot lengths and might tire audiences fed only on slap-dash Bolly movies.

All three leads are fantastic. Anil George looks uncannily like Vijay Anand and is totally believable as the shifty sleaze master who can go to any lengths to make money. Niharika Singh is quite a revelation as the starlet with almost angelic virtues. And as the classic tragic hero, Nawaz is brilliantly understated, doing so much without doing anything.

Purely as cinema, Miss Lovely is an acquired taste. But as a slice of our social history — the lost world of India’s exploitation film industry — it demands to be seen. It may not be “do ghante mein do hazaar jhatke”, but it will surely jolt you. And at the right place.