"A day will soon come when human beings will be offered at a discount." This is one among umpteen acidic one-liners (Joglekarisms?) thrown at random by award-winning author Dasrath Joglekar (Nana Patekar) in Goutam Ghose's Yatra. It is a pointer to the future of everything man has created – cinema, literature, music, dance, et al. This defines the essence of the film. Or does it? The 'journey' here is multi-layered and multi-dimensional – touching a myriad of sub-plots from the supposed disappearance and subsequent metamorphosis of the traditional nartaki , to the Americanization of call centres, to the unique concept of literature published and marketed by a major steel manufacturing company that also sponsors a prestigious literary award function, to Feng Shui, to farmer suicides (whew!). It takes potshots at the shopping mall culture, at the call centre industry, at MMS hard porn concocted by young men of their sessions in bed with their couldn't care less girlfriends and at politicians looking down the cleavages of young women.

Dasrath Joglekar is a famous writer whose new novel, Janazaa, has won a prestigious literary award. At home, he has an over-adoring family in the shape of a widowed mother (Bharati Devi), wife Sharada (Deepti Naval), daughter Sohini (Anandi Ghose) and son Iman Kalyan (Romit Raaj.) He insists on travelling by train to Delhi for the award ceremony and meets young filmmaker Mohit (Nakul Vaid) on the way. This marks the beginning of a triangle of possibilities – the writer gets into a dialogue with the filmmaker about how his novel, a fictionalized account of the tragic story of Lajwanti, is a largely romanticized and diluted version of the pain and the struggle she experiences in real life. As he begins the narration, Mohit offers his inputs as a filmmaker, explaining how a given scene would be composed, orchestrated, choreographed and edited. But these possibilities are left unexplored because the camera decides to telescope back and forth in time, taking the audience on a journey into the life of Lajwanti. Lajwanti (Rekha), a nartaki, who forms the backbone of the story, once an exponent of the mujra dance and song routine, is now reduced to performing lewd item numbers to Hindi film hits to an ugly, leering group in a seedy bylane of old Hyderabad.

Before he boards the train to Delhi, Joglekar has begun his next novel, Bazaar. His conversations and monologues generously spiked with sarcasm and satire, keep harping on the marketability of everything in contemporary life from a litterateur's response to his award to a television journalist, to the coordinator's (June Malliah) inadequate knowledge of Hindi to…. well, the less said, the better.

Yatra unwittingly rubs the film's producers, SPS Arts and Entertainment Limited, (an offshoot of a major steel manufacturing company,) the wrong way up. It actually inserts an already well-known ad of the company with a Mumbai star as the model, into the award function, as the company that has published Janaza and has also sponsored the award function. The strategy misfires, throwing up the production company as one that is brazenly trying to boost its manufacturing image (steel producers) with the added dimension of a cultural one (producing films). But then, it also fits neatly into the groove of Joglekar's next novel, Bazaar.

Somewhere along the way, the focus gets lost in a host of sub-plots. Is Yatra designed to be a platform for the second innings of Umrao Jaan (1981), a la Lajwanti, a la Rekha, in her globalised, 50+ avatar? If this be true, then Rekha has done a brilliant job except in the climactic scenes when she goes into hysterics of grief through Kathak twirls on the floor! Her item number Kabhi Aar Kabhi Paar can easily make the likes of Raakhee Sawant run for cover.

Questions remain. Lajwanti's dance costumes are exorbitantly expensive in style, design and cost. If she can afford it, what makes her remain in the dungeons of Mehendi Galli? She walked out in disgust from her patron Pulla Reddy's court in protest against his leering friends looking up under her skirt as she danced. In her Miss Lisa avatar, isn't she playing up to a similar gallery in a coarser way? Or, has time changed her priorities?

One wonders whether the film is aimed at stripping poor Nana Patekar of his marginal man stereotype by casting him as a littérateur of renown. But Patekar, with that deadpan expression and his deadpan voice, fails to deliver. The way he indulges himself in the bottle at all times of day and night and forgets to wash it down with his regular dose of Sorbitrate, makes one wonder about when he really puts pen to paper. He often breaks into splitting laughter without rhyme or reason and comes across as an irresponsible, rude and arrogant rascal hell-bent on talking down to people even in his fantasies. Looking back, he is nothing more than an intellectualized and politicized version of the horrible Pulla Reddy. The love, if there was any, between Lajvanti and Satish/Joglekar is not fleshed out at all, making for a rather unconvincing climax.

Joglekar's family is reduced to an awe-struck fan club with the fractional exception of wife Sharda raising a voice of protest against his relationship with Lajwanti, albeit, in flashbacks. Though Joglekar is a Maharashtrian surname, in the film, they are shown as Andhraites. In a fantasized shot, at a call centre, an angry Sohini protests when her boss insists she must pretend she is Susan, an American. As she gets up in disgust, crying out that she is Indian, she uses the Yankee "F"-word to prove her point!

The Gautam Ghose signature however, makes its strong presence felt all the way. The cinematography sets a model lesson for posterity to follow. Samir Chanda's production design, especially of the narrow bylanes of Mehendi Galli, is brilliant. Ditto for Anup Mukherjee's sound design. The music composed by Ghose himself (credit shared with Khayyam), carries his insignia of memories, post-modernity, mujra music and the purely classical, though they sometimes tend to disturb the narrative rather than enhance it. Saroj Khan and Saswati Sen's joint (?) choreography harks back to Umrao Jaan. Yatra proves that brilliance of technique and aesthetics can do little to rescue a script with excellent possibilities gone haywire. Not even tickets offered at a discount can save this film.