Mr. Singh Mrs. Mehta  is the title of the film though incongruously the lead protagonists happen to be Mr. Mehta and Mrs. Singh. First-timer Pravesh Bhardwaj’s direction keeps you as much puzzled as much as the intentional inversion in his film’s title. Considering that Bollywood has so few adult films to offer, this one’s a rare experience. And the fact that it is dealt with a degree of understatement and maturity, with a great music score (Ustad Shujat Hussain Khan and Sharang Dev) to translate the emotional quotient on to the screen, makes it a decent watch. Of course, we would have liked a bit more passion to flow between the protagonists, Mr Mehta and Mrs Singh (Prashant and Aruna) and have definitely liked Mrs Singh to stop falling asleep so often in Mr Mehta’s studio, but we are willing to forgive her this accentuated listlessness too.

With a painter protagonist going through artistic block, snail-paced tempo, self-styled aesthetic female nudity, circumstantially complicated human relationships and a climax so symbolic and subtle that you never comprehend when the end credits roll, Mr. Singh Mrs. Mehta meets all the requisite criteria of the alleged art-house cinema. Nothing wrong about it other than the fact that though the film expectedly runs out of entertainment, this one also fails to enlighten or even emotionally touch, move or bind you.

Artist Ashwin Mehta (Prashant Narayanan) paints his wife’s toenails more than he colours the canvas. Wife Sakhi Mehta (Lucy Hassan) is having an extramarital affair with Karan Singh (Naved Aslam). Karan’s wife Neera Singh (Aruna Shields) discovers her husband’s infidelity and seeks solace in Ashwin’s company. Though the adultery is openly evident since start, strangely both Ashwin and Neera never confront their respective partners and choose to have loyal illusions of their spouse.

Extensive footage of nudity seeps in the screenplay on the pretext that the artist can overcome his block by painting nude female form ala Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic or Randeep Hooda in Rang Rasiya . Surprisingly Neera initially shies away from posing nude despite the fact that she has been moving around naked in Ashwin’s warehouse for a major part of the film. And hold on… before your imagination runs wild, the fact remains that the continually censored blurs that ‘shields’ Aruna’s nude body will irritate you more than titillate.

Director Pravesh Bhardwaj spends liberal and lethargic screen-time in establishing the chemistry between Ashwin and Neera through corny conversations, transition songs and nude sketching which tends to get monotonous after a while. But when the relationships actually go crisscross and complicate in the concluding reels, Bhardwaj wraps up the narrative subtly and hastily without much clarity on the character correlations and conflicts, forcing you to do the guesswork.

More importantly, who is cheating and who is being cheated upon in this film which actually isn’t about Mr Singh and Mrs Mehta. It’s about Mrs Singh and Mr Mehta who play the game of infidelity with a degree of artistry and subterfuge, adding some strange twists and turns to what would otherwise have ended up as a predictable tale about dangerous liaisons.