Madhur Bhandarkar’s ‘Calendar Girls’ is nothing new and repeats the same old story. All that captures our attention in the entire movie are the five girls wearing different coloured bikinis. Madhur Bhandarkar does become successful in unveiling the dark and ugly side of the glamour world, but he cannot be forgiven for the poor screenplay.  The star cast in the movie is worth watching only if you wish to see curvy hot girls pouting in front of the camera. The known faces like Rohit Roy and Mita Vashisht in the movie do provide some justice to acting, however rest of the new girls are seen overacting and are forgettable. The unimaginative storyline and the starry dreams along with the fake limelight of the dark world are simply not worth watching. Save yourself from the trouble and don’t think of watching this one.

Slapdash and sanctimonious, Calendar Girls is a stunner, but for all the wrong reasons. It is stunning in its sheer stupidity. This film marks a new low for the rapidly waning Madhur Bhandarkar. Its portrayal of women, both sinning and sinned against, is smug, condescending and unabashedly exploitative. Calendar Girls is only about sex and sleaze presented on the pretext of unravelling the decaying innards of Bollywood and the cricketing world. It talks incessantly and very loudly about spot-fixers, sex racketeers, cheating husbands, corporate loudmouths and builders seeking a toehold in showbiz but never makes any sense at all. Take the cue. Give Calendar Girls a miss.

Calendar Girls is another Madhur Bhandarkar dud.  Look, either Madhur Bhandarkar is messing with all of us and is genuinely waging war on the way the industry works by sacrificing his own brand at the altar of truth, or he is blessed with a complete and utter lack of self-awareness. The latter is more likely, considering the way this film has been made. It's a preposterously sloppy production, a film where the casting brief apparently insisted on excluding all those with any talent. A few new girls are wrung through an excruciatingly bad script and the film is inconsistent on every level: visually, tonally, and in terms of narrative.Take the name off the poster and it's hard to believe this film has been made by someone who makes films. Either Bhandarkar magnanimously chooses to allow all of them a platform, or he doesn't know better. Or wait, have I just given him the idea for his next, Extras?

The only way a film like this can become palatable is if its gaze mined the multiple painful ironies inherent in the situation the girls find themselves in: one gets pushed into ‘VIP escort service’, another into being a trophy wife, another into a honey-trap between a greedy cricket match fixer and players. These strands are all played out to the hilt, hammering out the message that if you will willingly do these things – like, for example, become a ‘calendar girl’– You Will Come To A Sorry End. Girl, stay at home, and stay inside, or you will be forced into ‘bed–and-breakfast-service-to-men’ (yes, this crass line is from the film): is this a film about women having agency, or an outdated lesson on morality? A hurried after-thought, which talks of how these girls are really, truly ‘proud achievers’, comes right in the end. And it’s just that, an after-thought. The rest of it exploits—smugly, tackily, uncomfortably explicitly—young women being exploited.