Fashion Movie Review: Fashion Does not Live Up to the Hype!

In Fashion, Priyanka Chopra plays Meghna Mathur who dreams of becoming a super model. Though her conscience does not allow, she beats her small town sensibilities in her urge to become the show stopper. She meets up with a gay friend who connects her to a fashion designer. In the process of her struggle, she meets her model friend played by Arjan Bawa. Priyanka moves in to his place, they end up making love and finally moving out of each other, because Priyanka spends more time with Arbaaz Khan, owner of the brand Panache, for which she is given a lucrative assignment. The Panache assignment which Priyanka gets is the one which was represented by Kangana Ranaut. She is terminated by Arbaaz Khan who puts his favorite Priyanka Chopra instead. He impregnates her and when Priyanka embarrasses Arbaaz in front of his wife, he pulls her down the modeling career. Meanwhile a drug addict Kangana Ranaut being thrown out of the modeling world, dives herself full into cocaine and drug abuse, and becomes mad(similar to the real life story of Geetanjali). Priyanka too cannot handle her success and her termination from Panache, and takes refuge to drugs and spends night with a stranger. She is about to lose her sanity when she sees Kangana Ranaut, in the news and takes the responsibility of taking care of her. Meanwhile there is also a side plot of a gay designer(Sameer Soni) who is married to model Mughda Godse out of societal pressures

Plus points and best scenes of Fashion: Couples of scenes including the wardrobe malfunction and Priyanka Chopra's addiction to booze, drugs and her one night stand was well shown. Only that stretch of scenes carried some impact. The performances of Kangana Ranaut, Mughda Godse and most essentially Priyanka Chopra were the icing on the tasteless cake.

Minus points of Fashion: Fashion does not quite live upto the hype. There was so much Madhur Bhandarkar could have done to the film. The shock value which he usually puts in his movies like Chandni Bar, Corporate and Page 3 is not there. Instead, the first half looks like a mundane, boring rehash of Page 3. In the end, we have Kangana Ranaut's character dying due to drug abuse and Priyanka Chopra facing an unfortunate dilemma between walking the ramp and crying for Kangana. However the remorse cannot be felt, due to lack of any 'chemistry' or 'moments' between Kangana Ranaut or Priyanka Chopra. There should have been more scenes or moments of gratitude between Kangana and Priyanka to have made the impact felt. Secondly, a movie like Fashion could have touched a lot of topics like hidden cameras, the behind the scenes frustration and gimmick, MMS controversies, the sleaze etc. You feel there is much more in the fashion world which has been kept under wraps and not explored fully, at least to the caliber of what a Madhur Bhandarkar movie gives. Lastly, those gay scenes and gay sequences do not really impress.
Best performances of Fashion: Mughda Godse got bad dialogues but she showed that she is no novice when it comes to a good performance. Kangana Ranaut, shows that she is one person who can get into the skin of the character and raised the bar with a superb performance. But the movie Fashion belongs to Priyanka Chopra; she is in the screen 90 percent of the time, and almost everytime she has impressed. Priyanka Chopra has given her career best performance in Fashion and I daresay, an award winning performance. Priyanka Chopra has conveyed the right expressions of reluctance, regret, vanity, confusion, sorrow, happiness, ecstasy and arrogance with remarkable ease in Fashion. This conveys the fact that Priyanka Chopra is a director's actress. If she can give a bad performance like she did in Love Story 2050 and Krissh, Priyanka Chopra can also perform like a veteran as she did in Aitraaz and Fashion.

Final sentence on Fashion: Fashion could have been better researched and better documented, it is only the performances which save the day in lack luster movie-Fashion.