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Release date:
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September 16, 2016
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Director:
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Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury
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Cast:
Language:
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Kirti Kulhari, Taapsee Pannu, Andrea Tariang, Amitabh Bachchan, Angad Bedi, Vijay Varma, Raashul
Tandon, Tushar Pandey, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Piyush Mishra, Mamata
Shankar, Mamta Malik
Hindi, English
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Every sleazy hand that
ever groped you, every insulting conjecture ever made, every lascivious remark
ever thrown at you, every lewd gesture, every leering eye, they may all come to
mind as you watch director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink. This is a film about male privilege,
prejudice, sexual violence, and the many systems that support them.
The starting block of Pink is a rock show on the outskirts of
Delhi where Minal Arora (played by Taapsee Pannu), Falak Ali (Kirti Kulhari)
and Andrea Tariang (a character who shares her name with the actress playing
her) meet Rajvir Singh (Angad Bedi), Dumpy a.k.a. Raunak Anand (Raashul Tandon)
and Vishwajyoti Ghosh a.k.a. Vishwa (Tushar Pandey). Falak already knows
Vishwa. They get chatting. The women accept an invitation to drinks and dinner
at a nearby resort. Things go awry when Rajvir mistakes their sociability for
sexual availability and forces himself on Minal. She resists, he gets
aggressive, in a state of panic she smashes a bottle on his head.
This opening
incident is revealed through a smart narrative device between the opening and
end credits that tests our own biases as viewers in the he-said-she-said game
that ensues.
The film is about
Rajvir’s quest for revenge with the help of his friend Ankit Malhotra (Vijay
Varma), the girls’ quest for justice, and society’s interpretation of the
meaning of consent.
At a time when
sections of upper-class Delhi and Mumbai seem disturbed by the action taken in the Tehelka
and Mahmood Farooqui rape cases, and coming from an industry that
continues to make light of heroes molesting heroines in the guise of courtship,
Pink is a huge milestone simply by
virtue of its choice of theme. Mainstream Hindi cinema persists in perpetuating the notion that it is okay for a man to read a woman’s “no” as “maybe”. Just
weeks back, director Ali Abbas Zafar (Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, Gunday, Sultan) told me in an interview: “There are two ways of stalking. One way is ugly, one way is politically correct.” For such an
industry to make a film taking an undiluted position that a “no” from a woman
means “no” is in itself a reason to celebrate.
What goes against Pink though is an occasional
self-consciousness, an overt awareness that it has been created to send out a
message on women’s rights – an awareness that begins with its cliched title
(pink for girls, blue for boys, you know) and ultimately leads to some overly
dramatised courtroom episodes that cross the border into almost ridiculous,
self-defeating territory.
It is the film’s good
fortune that those scenes arrive very late in the day. Until then and after
they are through, there is plenty in this film that makes it worthy of our time
and discussions, from the many significant nuanced arguments it takes up in the
matter of violence against women to the top-of-the-line performances of the
three talented female leads and the four men playing their antagonists. Chowdhury’s heart is in
the right place and that in itself is worth toasting.
Pink smoothly packs multiple debates into a single
compact film: how society judges single women, the pre-conceived notions about women not staying with their parents, the assumption that
if women receive male visitors at home then they must be promiscuous, the
social definition of “provocation”, the stereotyping of women from certain
communities, the manner in which patriarchy paints men as helpless victims of
their hormones, the gentle reminder that patriarchy could not survive without
the collusion of at least some women and the reminder too that feminists may
well be men (a kindly landlord who refuses to buy into gossip about his female
tenants, the watchful neighbour, the sympathetic lawyer, the considerate
judge).
Pink also delivers a slap on the face of status
quo-ists who are alarmed at the tiny gains made by India’s women’s rights
movement in recent years. The whispers are no longer whispers, as
panic-stricken men anxious about a potential loss of millennia-old privilege
paint pictures of hordes of women filing false cases of violence and
discrimination against helpless men in a world rapidly switching to female
dominance. Pink has something to say
about all this and more.
Half the battle is won
for the film because Chowdhury’s clarity of thought is complemented by his
smashing cast. Pannu is relatively new to Bollywood but an established star of
Kollywood and Tollywood. Kulhari has done a few Bollywood films, but none so
far have been box-office successes. Both women have already proved that they
are extremely natural performers. They live up to that track record in Pink (though Pannu needs to work on her
enunciation of “coward” which was jarring in the film considering that the rest
of her diction was well-suited to a presumably public-school-educated Punjabi
girl from Delhi).
Andrea Tariang is a
welcome addition to the Mumbai cinemascape. Firstly, it is a joy to see a Hindi
film that actually features a character from Meghalaya – Bollywood tends to
pretend that the North-east of India does not exist. It is such a relief to see
the character being played by an actor from Meghalaya, unlike Mary Kom that avoided risking a newcomer
from Manipur, instead having a Manipuri Mary Kom played by a
part-Punjabi-part-Bihari-part-Malayali Priyanka Chopra since she is an
established star. Most important: Tariang is good.
The lead trio’s perfect
chemistry is the bedrock of this film, as is their demeanour. They come across
as real-life friends and real-life middle-class working women living in south
Delhi.
This would not have been
possible without the credible characterisation and effortlessly flowing
Hindi-English dialogues by writer Ritesh Shah. His screenplay also does full
justice to the four villains of the piece and all four actors are excellent.
Varma and Bedi merit a special mention for the conviction with which they convey
seething arrogance and male entitlement. Those clenched jaws, their sneering speech,
the way one of them snarls “aisi ladkiyon
ke saath aisa hi hota hai” (this is exactly what happens to such girls)
capture their furious resentment towards women who dared to say no and now dare
to ask questions. These are not creepy-looking fellows. That would have been
the lazy casting choice to make. They are, in fact, exceedingly attractive. It
is not their looks but their words and deeds that make them both scary and
slimy.
Every tiny
satellite role in Pink has been
carefully cast, though my pick of the supporting players are Mamta
Malik as investigating officer Sarla Premchand and veteran Dhritiman Chatterjee
as the judge – they are both superb. Megastar Amitabh Bachchan plays Deepak
Sehgal, a “manic depressive” retiree who re-dons his lawyer’s robes to fight
for the women – his is the only awkwardly written role in the film and it shows
in his slightly affected performance.
This is where Pink falters. It is not set up as a
song-dance-and-dishoom-dishoom saga
in the Damini mould, so you do not go
to court expecting “dhai kilo ka haath”
kind of dialoguebaazi. Pink does not
head off completely in that direction through Sehgal, but it is certainly not
as true-to-life in its judicial proceedings as you might expect from the
treatment up to that point.
(Spoiler alert) In a film that gets so much else right, it is especially
infuriating to watch that ridiculous scene in which Sehgal badgers one of his
own clients to reveal intimate details of her sexual past in a crowded
courtroom. Women’s rights movements worldwide have fought – are fighting – long
and hard to end such intrusive, suggestive interrogations of women victims by
defence lawyers. To have such behaviour from a woman’s own lawyer be projected
as a clever legal move is bizarre.
Just as bizarre is the scene involving a
woman victim claiming that she accepted money
for sex, though she did nothing of the sort. Why did she make this false
‘admission’? Because she wanted to drive home a complex point that a woman is
well within her rights to withdraw her consent once it is given. Even if you
accept that a beleaguered, frustrated woman might speak impulsively when harassed
in a witness box, it is unthinking of the film to suggest that she was being brave and intelligent not brainless.
Really? That is an intelligent move in a system already
stacked against women? Gimme a break. (Spoiler alert ends)
This is why in some
ways I
missed Rituparno Ghosh while watching Pink. No contemporary Indian film I
have seen has as effectively and believably captured the torture a woman victim
of violence is subjected to in court
in the way Ghosh’s Dahan did. These
instances of melodrama in Pink’s
courtroom scenes are absolutely unnecessary since there is so much drama
intrinsic to the situations anyway.
For the most part
though, Pink maintains a realistic
tone. Chowdhury
seems to have a clear vision of what he wants to say and how. The air of
tension he builds around the three women is almost palpable. It is tension that
rights-conscious women can identify with as we live out our lives so constantly
on edge that we ourselves may not notice our own instinctive actions and
gestures of self-preservation – the fact that many of us avoid making eye
contact with male strangers in public places especially in a culture of gender
segregation where men tend to misconstrue affability, the manner in which our
arms reflexively go up to cover our torsos in crowded spaces, the way we plan
our safety while planning our schedules.
It is hard, therefore, not to be
moved by the trauma and humiliation of Minal, Falak and Andrea who have to
justify their life choices, their clothing choices and their tiniest moves
before the world because one of them defended herself against an influential
man who tried to rape her. Its flaws and that title notwithstanding, Pink is a powerful film.
Rating
(out of five): **3/4
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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136 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
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