The second-half of this somewhat seductive jigsaw about a one-night scam, filmmaker Sudhir Mishra shows up as Neha Dhupia's father who drops in to have a chat with his rude daughter on the way to the airport.

Little does the stoic Mishra know that daughter has two men stashed away in a cupboard in the living room that looks intentionally like a prop on a stage set.

Strange sex comedies are allowed their moments of peculiarity.

Maybe at this point Saurabh Shukla intentionally wanted to introduce an element of staged comedy. After all, isn't the world a stage? Shakespeare got there first. But hell. Shukla is panting from behind to catch Shakespeare's comedy of ‘eros' in a modern milieu.

Shukla, who can be quite a funny-guy on demand, has made a quirky, sometimes crisp, sometimes placid, look-see at marriage and unfaithfulness.

The seductively-paced work is set at a party hosted by a loud Punjabi clueless woman, played with much gusto by Navneet Nishan, whose amiable husband Dalip Tahil is cheating on his fleshy wife with the slim seductress Neha.

In the movie, Neha seems to invite more male attention than is healthy for any girl with a respectable appetite.

Dilip isn't alone. Vinay Pathak, playing the goofy, a little stupid and undiplomatic regular guy once again, is cheating on his wife Anuradha Menon, the hilarious Veejay Lola Kutty trying hard not to be funny, and succeeding by checking out porn on the Internet.

But our main potential philanderer is Rahul, Rajat Kapoor as suave in his sleaziness as ever, married to the sullen Irawati Harshe who befriends Neha at a party, gets drunk and then forgets whether he actually did anything bad or not.

Hangover, anyone?

One of the problems here is that everyone speaks in Hindi because … well, they're part of a Hindi movie when they're characters who would be comfortable in English. Having said this and that, the characters seem to be effortlessly aware of their authentic bearings. None of the performers strays from the not-so-straight and borrowed path of betrayal, deception and faithlessness.

Rahul-Mitali marriage has a twist in its tail at the end and it doesn't shock you. It just makes you sigh. Shukla's direction embarks on a voyage through one night of steamy sensations. The revelations are hardly shocking, just diverting.

Elegantly cut, the material's chic movement doesn't quite justify the content. But the narrative has moments that spill out the acerbity underlining urban marriages which are at best functional and at their worst, lies told to keep up an appearance of domestic smoothness.

The movie exudes the scent of intelligence and competence. The actors all know their jobs. Most of them have earlier been through this kind of sexual-moral dilemma in some form or the other. The cutting edge is missing. But the proceedings never get awkward.

Overall, it is a praiseworthy film.