Seldom are movie titles aptly named; more often than not, a title is just an eye-grabbing exercise and not necessarily adding weight to what the film stands for. Not with the Janhvi Kapoor-led Ulajh. There is indeed a pot load of uljhi-huye things happening in this film to catch hold of.
When Kapoor’s Suhana Bhatia, a Deputy High Commissioner is first blackmailed by another character – that’s when the movie’s title logo appears with rousing music. You know you’re in for something incredibly unique and novel. Ulajh isn’t shot in your quintessential manner with wide shots and rendering that accentuate the frame – instead there’s a certain intimate treatment with the camera and the actor in frame which allows you to adapt to the mood that the director Sudhanshu Saria and cinematographer Shreya Dev Dube are deliberately going for. Even the frame isn’t your usual widened larger-than-life canvas but they opt for an almost 16:9 frame which makes things even more intimate.
If I had a nickel for every time I said that Janhvi Kapoor is not only one of the best female actors from the younger lot but also one of the most earnest performers, I’d be a millionaire. Kapoor, once again proves that she doesn’t just have the acting chops but also the knowledge of the beats of a character, the scene and the setting. Her chemistry with Roshan Mathew (another fine performance) shines and adds some much-needed humor to the otherwise grim atmosphere.
There’s a certain obvious effort made to not just make Ulajh intellectual but consciously complex, which is where the film falters and loses the plot. At its core, Ulajh is simply about a young female IFS high-ranked officer living in a man’s world being wronged by a few trying to have redemption and also save her country. But the predictable twists and turns coupled with an overly complicated screenplay that focuses too much on a certain level of sophistication and sleek treatment make up for a banal progression of events.
Ulajh is another case of what could have been but never is especially given the immense potential. Fine actors like Gulshan Devaiah, Meiyang Chang, and Rajesh Tailang are reduced to tropes and only Roshan Mathew gets the opportunity to add some gravitas and importance to his character, which he does.
Ulajh is indeed an entangled web that takes itself too seriously and while that would have been great, it never fulfils its immense potential.
