Coming from a film industry which continues to shy away from the three-letter word and given a chance would rather have two sunflowers caress each other rather than human skin, Mirch is a refreshing subject.

The last time an Indian film tried to tackle the politics of sex, Rituparno Ghosh’s Antarmahal took a rather dark look at the theme. But here, Vinay Shukla keeps the atmosphere light and spins together multiple tales of erotica with sharp wit and smart humour.

And while the Bengali film had mostly Bollywood stars making (a lot of) noise in bed, Mirch relies on the skills — at times sensual, at times sensitive — of two Bengali belles — Raima Sen and Konkona Sensharma — to keep the spice quotient high.

Like the two Darna films by Ram Gopal Varma and Dus by Sanjay Gupta, Mirch is very much a portmanteau film where four short films make up the complete picture. The connecting story is about an aspiring filmmaker Maanav (Arunoday Singh) trying to sell his script to a producer named Nitin (Sushant Singh) with the help of his film editor girlfriend Ruchi (Shahana Goswami).

While all the four tales end up being about a cheating wife caught red-handed by her husband, the sources and the settings are very different. The first one, straight out of Panchatantra, is about how a wife (Raima) convinces her husband (Rajpal Yadav) spying from under the bed that she is sleeping with another man so that her pati has a long life.

The second story taken from Boccacccio’s Decameron is about how a queen (Konkona) manages to make love to another man even as the king (Prem Chopra) watches.

The third one, inspired from an Italian fable, is about how a wife (Raima) pays back her suspecting husband (Shreyas Talpade), giving him a taste of his own medicine. In all these three stories, Arunoday Singh himself is the object of the woman’s fantasy.

And finally, in the original fourth story, a wife (Konkona) uses her presence of mind to fool her husband (Boman Irani) into believing that she was at the seedy hotel simply to catch him in the act.

The best thing about Mirch is that despite dealing with erotica, the film never resorts to the kind of vulgarity that abounds in our suggestive crass comedies. The sex factor in the stories stems organically and keeps you engaged with an inherent sensuousness and not cheap thrills.

The tales are not uniformly good, though. The first one is too abrupt while the third one goes on for too long. It is the Konkona-Prem Chopra story that is the best of the lot, punctuated by some terrific one-liners and triumphant singing by Ila Arun, the queen’s maid. The fourth one with Boman and Konkona is the funniest, with both at the top of their game.

The weakest link of Mirch is the connecting link. Sticking out between the stories, the strand of Maanav-Ruchi-Nitin is boring and unimaginative. And the worst bit comes when there is an attempt to explain the film — “it’s a celebration of womanhood, sir” — through that bridge yarn. If the four films had simply come one after the other, it wouldn’t have needed a rocket scientist to figure out that Mirch is about a woman’s right to have sex.

Vinay Shukla’s got himself a brilliant ensemble cast and almost each one of them does their characters justice and more. You expect the likes of Konkona, Boman, Rajpal, Shreyas and Shahana to carry it off with ease and they do just that. Raima is the real revelation. Not just because of the kind of steam she generates in bed, but the grace and poignance she brings to Manjula in the third story. The beefy Arunoday, last seen in Aisha, is patchy: smooth in some scenes, stiff in most.

Sudharkar Reddy shoots Mirch with aplomb and the very-classical soundtrack by Saawariya man Monty works well.

The Scoville scale measures the hotness of a chilli. If we would try and use it on Mirch, it may not give a very high reading. But then the film should be watched not for its eroticism but its bold premise and sharp wit, both rare in our cinema.

Konkona vs Raima

The two Bengali screen tigresses do not share a frame in their first film together, despite having two stories each.

And while on paper it may seem strange what someone like Konkona is doing in a so-called erotic film, well, the actress uses her eyes and face to great effect.

If Raima has all the body scenes, Konkona has the mind moves.

Bottomline? Both the Bong babes wow in Mirch, in their own bed-hopping ways.

Who is hotter, Konkona or Raima, and why? Tell t2@abpmail.com

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