When the mechanic's shop is closed down, it is replaced by the policeman's nephew's equally noisy video games parlour.

The film lavishly deploys surreally symbolic images: a giant four-poster bed in a small room, colour continuities between tractors, large metal drums in the street and the haldi (saffron) which the couple put on the walls to keep pests away, the yawning vehicles in the garage and the destructive imagery of the video games.

Mane is a Kafkaesque tale about a young couple (Naseeruddin Shah and Deepti Naval) that moves to the city from a village with the hope of finding privacy and freedom, which are unavailable in the joint family system.

For all its narrative excursions, in a sense, Mane is merely about the breakup of a marriage in which the Rossellinian couple, unable to confront each other directly amidst the loneliness of the city, externalizes their troubles – his powerlessness, her desire for freedom and their childlessness – and shifts blame on situations beyond their control in order to act victims.

A critique on urban spaces that suffocate more than they promise privacy, Mane unfolds like a sociological update on Rear Window (1954), in which personal anxieties and fears are displaced onto the surroundings and, specifically, onto a lower social class.