Stuff you can do with 105 minutes of your life:<br> You can get a haircut. <br> You can play a game of golf.<br> You can go grocery shopping.<br> You can fight with your spouse.<br> You can smoke a few cigarettes and introspect.<br> You can take a vintage bike ride through the city.<br> You can go skinny dipping with your boyfriend/girlfriend.<br> You can go street shopping with your girlfriend/boyfriend.

<strong>A painstakingly slow narrative fails to engage your senses</strong><br/> A story about love, loss and everything in between, Fireflies is an earnest attempt at changing the way cinema is consumed by Indian audiences. An independent film by Sabal Singh Shekhawat, it explores the complexities of human relationships and is set against the backdrop of two brothers (Rahul Khanna and Arjun Mathur) who grow apart due to a tragic past, and cross paths years later due to a twist of fate. Rahul plays an investment banker stuck in an unhappy marriage, who seeks solace in the arms of an ex flame (played by Shaivani Ghai). Arjun plays a law school dropout-turned-bartender who falls for a free-spirited writer (Monica Dogra) only to learn later that her life's baggage is probably heavier than he thought. The characters share a common sense of despair and vulnerability that eventually consumes them or liberates them.

An off-Bollywood movie, mostly in English, risks coming off all precious and stilted. 'Fireflies' has characters who are comfortable in English (in fact, when a couple of them have spoken in Hindi in previous parts, they've sounded as if they would be better off in English), which is a good thing.

<strong>Fireflies is is one giant cesspool of sadness and agony that is ever-expanding and will engulf every barely happy soul it can get its hand on , warns Paloma Sharma.</strong><br>Kaun kambakht bardasht karnay ko peeta hai? Hum to peete hain ki yahan par bhaith sakain, tumhein dekh sakain, tumhain bardasht kar sakain," Devdas famously uttered once, presumably because he watched Fireflies. Alcohol is to Fireflies what cigarettes were to Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and a tear-dimmed tide is unleashed on the characters of this intimate character-study. Fireflies is a well-intentioned 'Indie' film with a very clear-cut target audience. Admittedly there is an inherent pretentiousness attached to an Indian film where the characters, no matter how urbane, speak only in English. Even the songs in Fireflies are in English. That's like a sonata in Sonepur Mela. Nonetheless there is a fascinating undercurrent of sensuality to the proceedings -- crimson-red wine clinking in crystal glasses, diamonds rustling against silken saris, the rain splattering against highe-rise windowpanes to accentuate the pain...all of this compounded by a very good-looking cast that seems to intuitively grasp the nature of the goings-on.