Romancing the large bag of cash.

Kshana Kshaban (1991) opens with a bank robbery gone bad, leading to a shootout with the police.  Ringleader Narayana (Horse Babu) manages to escape with one accomplice and a bag of money, but he kills the accomplice and runs off with the money, infuriating his boss, quirky crimelord Nayar (Paresh Rawal).  After concealing the money, Narayana hides out in his brother's photo studio, where he is quickly caught and tortured.

Narayana did leave directions to the treasure, but through a series of coincidences the directions wind up in the hands of one of the photo studio's customers, spunky office worker Satya (Sridevi).  One of Nayar's men tracks her to her apartment, and after a brief struggle over  a pair of scissors, he winds up dead.  Unfortunately, Satya's creepy neighbor chooses that precise moment to drop by, and even more unfortunately he's from the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, so Satya suddenly finds herself on the run from the police.

And that's when she meets Chandu (Venkatesh Daggubati), a streetwise thief with the requisite heart of gold.  he saves her from a pair of Eve teasers, and when the police show up looking for Satya, he assumes they're looking for him (because thief), takes her hostage, and the pair flee into the Fire Swampnearby forest.

Kshana Kshanam has a remarkably straightforward plot, especially for an Indian movie from the Nineties; there's a clear MacGuffin, and Satya and Chandu look for it while dodging both Nayar's goons and the police.  Sridevi handles the bulk of the comedy, so there's no need for a comic relief subplot.  Still, the movie is two and a half hours long, and fills its running time with wild changes of tone.  The opening bank robbery is dark and bloody and features no dialogue, while the scenes of Satya's daily life are bright and brittle, painting a picture of a woman who is not happy and hasn't realized it.  And yet when Satya and Chandu begin to fall in love (because of course Satya and Chandu fall in love) we get dance numbers.  Colorful, enthusiastic, occasionally silly dance numbers.

 Kshana Kshanam was director Ram Gopal Varma's second film, and it shows; many of Varma's directorial quirks are on display here, including his trademark weird camera angles, but they lack polish.  It is an interesting idea to film part of a car chase from the underside of a car, for instance, but it doesn't really work well in practice.  Still, while the movie is sometimes clumsy, it is consistently interesting.  Granted, sometimes the movie seems to be coasting on Sridevi's natural charisma, but she's got charisma to spare, so you can do that.