Why Aamir shouldn't have produced 'Dhobi Ghat'

New Delhi: This isn't a movie review. People better qualified than I am have wrung the movie dry of its hidden nuances.

As a sporadic moviegoer, I use the dark cocoon of a cinema hall and its strangely comforting anonymity to disconnect with reality for a few hours - much like millions of others. I am unashamed to say that I do not go to watch a movie with great intellectual expectations. That burden still lies with the director.

However, there is a thing I like to call the psychological branding.

Let me explain. While American kids can rattle off Super Bowl statistics or know instinctively without being told who has the best pitching arm, Indians are born experts on cinema. The mildest of Bengali youths has the potential to turn ferocious in a debate on the relative merits of Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chattopadhyay.

Rajinikanth is a great entertainer, sure. But is he a great actor? Any ordinary middleclass moviegoer from Chennai will prove to you in 15 minutes, over tiny diagrams drawn on the back of an office memo, how in fact you can't tell apart your basic movie stars and should go back to the woods you came from.

Cinema is in our blood, no, in our genes. We grow up with a social conditioning on cinema stars, their best years, their worst performances, their habits and anecdotes on their lives. So we know exactly what to expect when we go to watch a Rituparno Ghosh film or a Mani Ratnam magnum opus. We expect no more or no less. It's what I call psychological branding.

Actors, directors and key players from the movie industry create that branding for us, which also balances the pressure of expectations nicely on their very able shoulders. Aamir Khan is one such actor who over years of meticulous planning has set his own branding.

Now, on to 'Dhobi Ghat'. As a moderately informed outsider, I know Kiran Rao only by reputation. That she is Aamir Khan's wife and that she is embarking on an independent project which has the potential to create a sublime divide in the cinema going experience as we know it.

Who decides what good cinema is?

Certainly not critics, since their judgment is as coloured by individual preferences as ours is by our own psychological brands.

Here's my issue with 'Dhobi Ghat'. While I understand that a director, especially a debuting one, puts his or her soul into a new project, the audience has no emotional stake in a film. But in semi-urban areas and even in large families in urban areas, the whole movie-going experience involves the investment of a day's wage for some. In some cases it is stolen time between picking up the children from school or three hours snatched from the week's single day off from work.

Therefore I demand that people we have reasonable expectations from, deliver. 'Dhobi Ghat' is an excruciatingly slow experience that neither has mindless appeal nor art house finesse. Bombay, (I call it Bombay since the director wouldn't, despite all of the experiences of the fifth protagonist being alien to what is new Mumbai) is shown at its cliched best, as are its protagonists.

Every aspiring washerman, tea stall owner and street urchin in Mumbai is aspiring to be…hold your breath…a movie star. Notwithstanding the fact that the city's flourishing economy supports the dreams of hundreds of thousands of software professionals, engineers and entrepreneurs. The token NRI is on a sabbatical and searching for the "real India."

The rich and bored housewife is of course seeking sexual fulfillment from the 'dhobi' who comes in once a day. The painter of course isn't your next-door-guy who does anything as remotely normal as belching after a 'pao bhaji' meal. He's edgy, prickly and I'm guessing – misunderstood - as painters in cinema usually are. Did I miss the underworld connection that symbolizes life in Mumbai's dark underbelly? The filmmaker didn't. The hero's close buddy falls prey to it eventually in a sequence that makes no sense in the overall scheme of things.

I keep hearing how great lead actress Monica Dogra is. The entire time I sat through the movie, with cell phones ringing all around me (people who switched off their phones in the beginning, turned them on gradually as the movie crawled to completion) her otherwise perfect Hindi spoken with a heavy American accent grated on my nerves. I wish Rao had the guts to let her speak in English throughout and not worry about the paying non-English speaking audience.

Therefore, the anger when we are told, smugly, after the box office returns are lukewarm, that Dhobi Ghat isn't "a film for everyone." Don't the viewers have a right to this disclaimer before they spend money on a film? It shouldn't then have been promoted as heavily as a commercial film from the word go.

Like millions of people who are not privy to first cuts and exclusive showings to colleagues of a film while it is still being made, we tend to trust blindly. If Aamir Khan is associated with a film, how bad can it be? That's the most common of all logic on the streets. He moved us to tears (and me with repeat viewings) with 'Taare Zameen Par'. He defied age in '3 Idiots.' I have great demands from the man, and by default, his wife. And they let me down, personally.

At best Dhobi Ghat is a documentary project by a director who has great potential if only she wouldn't try so hard. And that's why Aamir Khan shouldn't have produced Dhobi Ghat.