Une Plus Une review: Jio MAMI's closing film is forgettable but has a beautiful Indian setting

Remove Jean Dujardin (of The Artist fame) from this movie and you’ll have something that you’ll get lost watching. Une Plus Une starts with montages of India and its spiritual background. As an opening, this image, then serves as a background to what you’re going to be bombarded with in the next 2 hours. Rahul Abhi (Rahul Vohra, a character who is always clad in clothes that seem like he’s headed to a party after the sequence), is an Oscar winning, new-wave Indian director who is seen shooting montages or probably researching for something as the movie opens. [caption id=“attachment_2508770” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A still from the film. Image from Facebook/[/caption] Montages of an India that the western world associates with then appear; Aghori babas, Benares and the spiritual god mother, Amma, inter cut with a bank robbery sequence and a dance rehearsal. Enter Ayana (Shriya Pilgaonkar) and Sanjay (Abhishek Krishnan), who the stars of the movie within this movie. There’s also a robber who falls in love with the girl he runs over while fleeing with his loot. Wait what? This is just one of the parallel tracks that start off at this point in the film. Claude Lelouch, then introduces us to his forever romantic & male protagonist, the music director Antoinne Abellard (Jean Djuardin) who keeps falling in and out of love, quite randomly. Antoinne then begins with his criticism (the first of many) of India and its spirituality and multi layered cultures via different mediums; the most common being his headache which he keeps asking aspirins for! The movie then turns black and white and that is when you realize everything you’ve seen in the first two minutes was probably fiction inside the narrative. Once in the zone of these parallel tracks, the movie starts to get confusing. Not just in the sense that it has multiple plot conflicts, but also because its protagonist is just as confused as its screenplay. Une Plus Une however discovers and reveals to us (Indians) how we often forget to look into our own selves. The French Ambassadors wife Ana Hamon, played by Elsa Zylberstien, is the text heavy, always blabbering lost cause and she makes us realize what we ignore around us. When you look at the larger picture, she leads to a conclusion for her male protagonist but only ends up confusing herself. The movie moves like a snake between its narratives and it’s difficult to decifer what the filmmaker really wants to say. Lengthy dialogues and redundant conversations between the protagonist and the ambassador’s wife gets annoying before it shifts to an almost abrupt scene at a fog filled station in Delhi. Dujardin’s character is one that the director speaks his heart through. It’s someone who falls in love almost instantly but is heartless in his endeavors. The film then suddenly lands in the middle Rajasthan, has the protagonists dance to Rajasthani folk before it switches back to the Ganges, and from here on the geography of India just starts to get as twisted as the screenplay. This movie makes you enjoy silence, ambiance music and the visuals, because that’s the only time when the actors shut up. Une Plus Une make you want to travel to the Ganges and visit Amma, but that’s about it. There’s nothing you take back after the movie watching experience. Une Plus Une was the closing film at the JIO MAMI film festival.  Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is a venture of Reliance Industries, which owns Network18 (of which Firstpost is a part).