It's probably complicated.

Abhay Deol is the nephew of Dharmandra, the "He-Man" of Bollywood, and the cousin of nineties action stars Bobby and Sunny Deol.  Despite belonging to the Deol dynasty, though, Abhay has really focused on what's called "parallel cinema", and even when he dabbles in mainstream films, he tends to play complicated and nuanced characters rather than the usual action and romantic roles.  So when I sat down to watch Velle ( 2021), I knew I would be getting an Abhay Deal movie, but I did not realize how very Abhay Deol the movie would be.

Deol plays Rishi, a ghost-writer in the film industry who hopes to finally make a movie under his own name. He's hoping that Bollywood star Rohini (Mouni Roy) will agree to play the lead, and when they finally meet, he begins narrating the story to her in traditional Bollywood fashion.

Cut to Rahul (Karan Deol), Rambo (Savant Singh Premi) and Raju (Vishesh Tiwari), a trio of high school slackers who call their tight-knit circle of friends "R3".  (They all look too old to be in high school, but the film helpfully explains that they've failed the twelfth grade several times.)  When they meet the principal's troubled daughter Riya (Anya Singh) she quickly becomes their partner in mischief, joining the group as R4.

Riya wants to dance, but her father insists that she focus on her studies, and forces her to take late night tuition sessions with one of the teachers.  When the teacher touches her inappropriately, her father thinks she's lying to get out of work.  Riya turns to her friends, and Rahul suggests that she just leave, go to another city and study dance.  Of course, she'll need money, so they hatch a ridiculous scheme to fake Riya's kidnapping and get her father to pay a ransom.

And it works!  Riya leaves town and enrolls in dance school.  The plan is for the other three Rs to join her later, but before they can, Riya is actually kidnapped.  The real kidnappers want a million rupees, but instead of contacting her father they accidentally contact Rahul.  He promises to get the money somehow.

Meanwhile, Rishi and Rohini have grown closer as he works his way through the story.  They are so close that when Rishi receives a call from his mother telling him that his father is in the hospital and they'll need a million rupees for the operation, Rohini immediately volunteers to help.  The money is withdrawn from the bank, and as the pair are driving to the hospital, a stone flies through the windscreen, Rohini is knocked out and seriously injured, the car crashes, and the money is stolen . . . by Rahul, Rambo and Raja.

And then things get complicated.  Riya is in real and immediate peril.  The three Rs try to negotiate her release, but it gets much harder when they realize that Rahul has lost his phone.  Rishi is scouring the city looking for the money he needs to save his father.  And Riya's father has put lazy but very clever police inspector Rajni Verma (Rajesh Kumar) on the case.

Velle handles its shifts in genre well, but I have questions!  Rishi is narrating a story which he says is fictional, but with some elements of truth.  The movie certainly implies that that movie plot is the story of Rahul and Raya, but nobody bats an eye about the story within a story escaping from within the story, and Rishi doesn't seem to recognize any of R3, so if they weren't his story, then what is his movie actually about?  Why does every single named character who appears onscreen have a name that starts with R, and what;s with all the Rs appearing in the background of various scenes?  Is the police inspector doing a deliberate Rishi Kapoor impression?  Is all of this deliberate ambiguity or just me missing things because I am watching a movie that's in a language I do not actually speak?

Having questions is good, I think?  I will certainly be thinking about this movie for a while.  And there's one thing I know to be true: Abhay Deol stars in some weird movies.

(And yes, Karan Deol is related; he's Sunny Deol's son.)