During a recent trip to the city, Paa maker Balki said that choosing a story/concept for a feature film is a big challenge given that you have to stay excited about it for the next year or more, when the film is getting made.

Ram Gopal Varma doesn’t take a year to make his films these days. He is usually done with one within a few weeks. Yet, as his last few films will tell you, he seems to lose interest in them midway through the making.

It’s that one-line idea or, as is the case with Not A Love Story, a real-life event — two lovers making love in front of a dead body and then chopping it up in pieces — that excites RGV and he gets people to stitch together some story around it so that he can go bonkers with his camera.

Really, watching RGV’s films these days makes you imagine a long chain of ants carrying the camera on their heads. Almost every shot is from the floor level, sneaking under Mahie Gill’s skirt every now and then. This is NOT style; it’s sheer obsession, letting a horny camera on the loose.

No matter how many times you play Rangeela re in the background, Mahie will not start oozing sex appeal like an Urmila Matondkar. And no matter how many times you have her take a shower, there’ll be no aag (sorry, Ramu!) in that paani.

Despite the “entirely fictional” disclaimer at the start, Not A Love Story is obviously inspired from the Neeraj Grover murder case. It’s the summer of 2008. It’s an apartment in Malad. The man chopped up, Ashish (Ajay Gehi), is shown helping out aspiring actress Anusha (Mahie) get a foothold in the movie industry when her lover from Chandigarh, Robin (Deepak Dobriyal), arrives and draws blood. Okay, spills blood. And bones, yes.

It’s a crime of passion and while there definitely are a couple of moments of passion here and there (read: sudden bursts of sustained liplocks) RGV treats the crime thriller like a horror flick building up the building like a haunted house.

Also, the laziness in the film’s exposition scenes is appalling. Varma may have captured a girl with big heroine dreams many times before (Rangeela, Naach) but for a viewer every story has to stand on its own two feet. The scenes and song showing Mahie trying to make it in Bollywood is so matter-of-fact and cliche-ridden, you too wait for the big scene. Like Ramu.

Of course, in the middle of all the chop-and-chant there are flashes of the original RGV. The scene where the cop (Zakir Hussain) interrogates Anusha and her two friends at the police station shows what the Satya maker can still achieve in a scene. If he wants to, that is.

He really doesn’t and nothing is more in your face than the complete lack of detailing. How can a man who must be weighing 70kg be carried with such ease by two people? Even if his body is chopped up and split into seven plastic packets.

The acting too leaves a lot to be desired. In her quest to look glam, Mahie botches up quite a few scenes but she is effective in the second half as the woman with the secret. Dobriyal, who was the find in Omkara as Saif’s sidekick, sadly overdoes his time-bomb-ticking-in-the-brain eye movements.

Every RGV film is now an exercise in how a director, who was one of the best in the business, can lose his sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice, to his fixation with the cinematic form.

Sorry Ramu, no matter where you stick that randy camera of yours, your yankee doodle is anything but dandy. Keep trying.