The guilty husband makes breakfast for his wife. "Darling, I forgot the ketchup," he proceeds to the kitchen... and guess whom he finds sitting on the window ledge? The Wanton Woman. "You're busy serving breakfast to your wife while I'm dying to be served," she purrs urgently.

Welcome to the world of female seduction.

The female predator is no stranger to cinema in the West. Remember Demi Moore in "Disclosure", Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" and Jessica Walter stalking deejay Clint Eastwood in "Play Misty For Me"?

Admittedly the female go-getter is a new phenomenon in our films. She has been played with stunning élan by Urmila Matondkar in "Pyar Tune Kya Kiya" and Priyanka Chopra in "Aitraaz".

The creature of the night who will not take no for an answer has never been more lurid in her intentions than in "Chetna..." -- not to be confused in any way with the bold and path-breaking 1970s film of the same name by B.R. Ishaara in which Rehana Sultan played a no-holds-barred prostitute.

Is it just coincidental that Payal Rohatgi is more aggressively tart-like in her portrayal of the female tycoon than Rehana Sultan could ever be as the sex worker in "Chetna" 30 years ago? Or is it just the sign of the times?

The female tycoon is more carnivorous than any of her screen avatars so far. She makes no bones about her intentions regarding her subordinate Samir (Jatin Grewal) a happily married man who suddenly finds himself in the vortex of a sexual assault from his boss.

Sandwiched between two women who want only one thing from him (and it isn't companionship) Grewal looks more confused about his love life than Salman Khan.

Gliding down Dubai in a limousine as elongated as Rohatgi's legs, the hero suddenly finds himself being pawed by his boss (blessedly a lady). "Your wife has kept the 'karva chauth vrat (a fast by Hindu married women)' for you. But I will break the fast with you."

Fasting and sex... tradition and titillation? Hmmm. Not bad as a captivating combination, if only director Parto Ghosh knew the 't' of either word.

Rohatgi, no stranger to the bold fold, takes on the aggressive mantle in bed with clenched-teeth inevitability.

But if "Chetna" is an ode to the voyeuristic instinct, then sorry, this one is a certifiable dud. It fails miserably to evoke even a shred of erotica. If it is meant to be homage to marital fidelity, then the lady playing the aforementioned carnivore's toy-boy should have played her role with a graph.

But graph? That's a laugh in a film that creates wet dreams for an infertile humanity. The wife (Navneet Kaur) first gets into a sari to play the dutiful wife then into a slit skirt to play the avenging angel.

Clothes and profession definitely determine the morals of the female characters in this monstrous marital muddle.

Even the most diehard peeping tom would find it hard to bear the bare facts of this tattered take on infidelity.