Page 114 - October 2018 converted

LOVE SONIA

Cast:
Mrunal Thakur, Richa Chadha, Frieda Pinto, Manoj Bajpayee, An-
upam Kher, Adil Hussain, Sai Tamhankar
Director:
Tabrez Noorani

Review :
The trafficking of girls keeps returning as a theme in films. How
village ingénues are lured to the red-light areas, how they are
beaten and threatened into submission, and how they survive,
are familiar tropes. Love Sonia revisits the territory with an inter-
esting cast, but doesn’t come up with anything remarkably new,
plot-wise, or treatment-wise, ending up like a latter-day Salaam

movie review

Bombay.
The real find is Mrunal Thakur who plays Sonia, the younger of
two sisters, both victims of the vicious men and women who trade is ‘readied’ to get her ‘seal broken’, and sent overseas as mer-
in flesh. Sonia gets ensnared in a brothel even as she struggles to chandise, one looks for newness, but finds mostly clichés, geared
discover the whereabouts of her sister Rashmi. She has no idea towards foreign eyes.
where to start, but she has no intentions of giving up. As Sonia Along the way, she encounters the ruthless guy (Bajpayee) who

runs his house like a ‘business’, the
other girls with tragic back-stories, in-
cluding one played by Chadha. And
the well-intentioned Manish `bhaiya’
(Rao) who works with a NGO com-
mitted to the cause of rescuing and
rehabilitating the women.

More focus on what happens to the
girls when they are yanked from that
life would have made Love Sonia
fresher, and given the characters
more to play with. That is not some-
thing we see too often, and there is a
tiny glimpse of it in the film. The rest
of it is same-old.

114 |DALLAS | OCTOBER 2018 | VOL 157 www.thebmagazine.com