Red Rose, Blue Beard

When reviewing a movie, I generally try to avoid spoilers, but the big twist in Red Rose is telegraphed from the very beginning: Anand (Rajesh Khana), wealthy businessman, suave hairy-chested bachelor, and our apparent protagonist, is a serial killer. Whenever he meets an attractive woman, he’s haunted by visions of a village girl in a slight state of undress. The women in question tend to mysteriously vanish soon after.

Anand’s latest obsession is Sharda (Poonam Dhillon). Unlike the other women Anad meets, Sharda is a Nice Indian Girl, and won’t let herself be lured back to his isolated mansion before marriage, so he has to woo her. He does so mostly by being creepy; he goes to the department store where she works, stares at her for a while, then buys a single handkerchief from her every day. After buying a t-shirt from another counter in order to make her jealous, Anand follows Sharda on her way home, confesses his love, and suddenly they’re a couple. Love is a funny thing.

Anand brings his bride home to the mansion, shows her every room in the building except one, introduces her to his strange, sullen servants, drops a few more hints about his psychological instability, sings a love song which lasts for an indeterminate amount of time, and then has to leave the house for a sudden business emergency. (And by business emergency, I mean tracking down and killing the waiter who saw him with an earlier victim.) Left alone, Sharda literally stumbles onto the horrible truth: her new husband is a murderer, and everyone else in the house is in on it. Including the cat.

It all sounds very exciting, and it should; the story has persisted for centuries, in one form or another. Unfortunately, Red Rose is shot and edited like . . . like a foreign art film from the seventies, full of strange camera angles and acid trip flashbacks and long, ponderous conversations that sound like they’re supposed to be profound but never actually go anywhere, all set to a funky, jazz tinged (and really excellent) soundtrack. This movie is slow.

The film also spends more screentime on Anad and Sharda’s stalkertastic courtship than on the presumably interesting parts. Rajesh Khanna’s performance may be a little too good. He plays Anand as a man with a deeply warped sexuality who has been training since his teenage years to avenge himself and his adopted father against all the treacherous women of the world. He’s a volatile mix of sleazy charm and neurotic tics, and it’s hard to see what Sharda, a perfectly nice girl, sees in him.

There may be a deeper message here, especially in light of the early scene of Anand at the prison distributing sweets and fruits to convicts, all of whom were guilty of various acts of violence against women. However, any such message is undercut by all the shower scenes. This is a movie which can’t decide what it wants to be; it’s too ponderous to be thrilling and too exploitative to be profound.