By Hindustan Times
Direction: Pooja Bhatt
Actors: Sunny Leone, Randeep Hooda, Arunoday Singh
Rating: **
Yeh jism pyaar karna nahin janta, janta hai toh sirf bookh, jism ki bookh. This crackling dialogue was uttered within the original Jism by Bipasha Basu, wearing a strategically cut white gown. We've become blasé about sex in Bollywood, but back then, this felt edgy and perilous. Twelve months before the game-changing Murder, Jism coloured Bollywood's traditional, chaste plots, with unapologetic lust.
I thought that Jism 2, that's a sequel only as it also has sex, might push the envelope again. After all, it has a real-life porn star Sunny Leone, playing a porn star Izna. But please disregard all thoughts of Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, which has a real-life porn star playing a high-class hooker. Here, Izna's career choice has no reference to the story, which is, hands down, one of the most silliest in recent history. Izna is hired by a secret agency to seduce a killer, who was also her ex-lover, Kabir, played by Randeep Hooda. Her payment to be a honey trap is Rs.10 crore, and he or she informs her employers that she travels "only top quality." But somewhere along the way, her agency contact, Ayaan, played by Arunoday Singh, also falls in love together with her. So in some scenes Ayaan tells Izna in an urgent voice, "Let's meet and strategise." (I laughed out loud). In others, he watches her as she sleeps, running a torchlight over her body.
Over the past decade, the Bhatts (Mahesh, who has written this film, Mukesh and Pooja) became experts at creating low-budget thrillers that experience a high sex quotient, melodious songs and often, Emraan Hashmi. A number of the three, Pooja has the keenest aesthetics, so regardless of how inexpensive her films are, and so they look good. Jism 2 is about in lovely, leafy Sri Lankan locations. The love-making includes white candles, bath tubs and massage oils. Perhaps that is what she means when she says that the film has a female gaze.
But neither a female nor masculine gaze can combine intense passion with the sort of ridiculous story. For an erotic film, everyone talks way an excessive amount of. Of course, we get love-making, Leone's bare back and ample cleavage. However the Bhatts - Mahesh and Pooja - also wish to unveil some deeper truth about men, women and their obsessions with one another. So Jism 2 plays out like an unintentionally funny fever dream. Kabir is a type of artist-assassin. He plays the cello and sings mournfully. He quotes Faiz to Izna and says lines like, Mausam guzar jaate hain, yaad nahin guzarti. Hooda is a very good actor but here he appears to be emoting for all three of them. Leone, who's very pretty, clearly wasn't cast for her acting skills, but honestly, she's not bad. She wisely finds a type of half-bewildered, half-heavy breathing expression after which stays with it. When the emotion becomes too complex for her to handle, Pooja cuts to the back of her head.
Jism 2 will need to have been far more fun than this. The film is an anti-climactic let-down. We used to have a word in college for experiences like this: I CANNOT use it here but I FEEL you realize what I mean.
