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Release
date:
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October 11, 2019
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Director:
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Shonali Bose
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Cast:
Language:
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Priyanka Chopra
Jonas, Farhan Akhtar, Zaira Wasim, Rohit Suresh Saraf
Hindi
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In a defining scene
in The Sky Is Pink, a well-meaning
woman offers Aditi and Niren Chaudhary a shoulder to cry on. The couple has
just lost their 18-year-old daughter Aisha, so when their friend says she
understands their pain because she is going through the same thing, you
assume she too has lost a child. But no, her family is instead coping with the
death of a parent who was, at 73, as the lady puts it, too young
to die.
You would imagine
that it must take a particularly stupid or insensitive person
to equate the passing away of a teenaged child and a septuagenarian
parent. But the Chaudharys’ friend is neither stupid, nor insensitive – she is
a reasonably intelligent, affectionate woman reduced to making meaningless
remarks in the face of their heartbreak. Which makes her
simply human.
Because one of the
most human of all reactions to another person’s grief is to fill silences with mindless
sentences. There are no absolutely appropriate words to say when death comes
visiting, and so people tend to get awkward and say terribly
inappropriate things.
Writer-director
Shonali Bose is perhaps better equipped than most to respond to a fellow human
being coping with the death of a child, having herself known this tragic loss,
as the closing text on screen reminds viewers. This, as much as her
natural talent as a storyteller, may explain why Bose rarely puts a foot wrong
with the emotional graph of The Sky Is Pink,
an uncommonly calm, collected, non-sappy take on the life and death of a
girl born with a rare congenital disorder.
For a start, Bose –
who earlier made Amu and Margarita With A Straw – and her
co-writer Nilesh Maniyar go down an unconventional path by making their film
not about the little girl, although the life of a bright kid cut prematurely
short is brimming with potential to tug at the heartstrings. Instead, they
pivot their story on her mother and father, their romance,
their marriage, their decision to have Aisha against genetic odds that
they are aware of, their journey as parents of a kid who they know they
are likely to outlive, and the abiding love that keeps them going.
Having made this
uncommon choice, Bose and Maniyar go a step further by packing The Sky Is Pink with sunshine.
Based on a true
story, the film is narrated by Aisha herself, a dead Aisha who lets on right at
the start that she is speaking to us from beyond the grave. This is a
narrative decision that at first threatens to go all cutesy on listeners as the
girl introduces her family by her nicknames for them: Moose for her Mama Bear,
Panda for her Papa Bear, and Giraffe for her brother Ishaan. The filmmaker may
argue that this is how the real Aisha would have spoken, but the jury is out on
that one since videos of her speeches available online suggest otherwise. Aisha
persists with these names throughout the film, which is occasionally
irritating, but never so much as to overshadow the incredibly moving story she
recounts in an otherwise incredibly
moving fashion.
Where the narrative
might have been well served by extending itself is in the side effects of
Aditi’s pre-occupation with Aisha. The
Sky Is Pink dwells at length – and very well – on how Aditi’s obsessive approach
to the care of her unwell daughter affects her marriage, causes her to get
aggressive with medical professionals and justifiably strict with
household help. But she is never less than likeable to anyone in her
circle, not even to her frightened but loyal staff, and that is hard to believe
considering the nature of her fixation on Aisha even as it is portrayed in the
film.
Perhaps this was
inevitable. The film is, after all, based on the real-life Chaudharys’ own
memories and records, which means it is largely their account of
themselves.
Another aspect that
remains untouched is class privilege. At the start of the journey with Aisha,
Aditi and Niren are a struggling middle-class couple who have to scrape cash
together to travel to London for their infant’s treatment, but in a little over
a decade Niren has sped up the corporate ladder and they are the occupants of a
posh farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. This rise in their fortunes is shown
to solely affect their ability to afford costly treatments for Aisha, and
nothing else – not their attitudes, not their equations with others or each
other, nothing.
In a speech she
delivered in her avatar as a motivational speaker towards the end of her life,
the real Aisha herself had expressed awareness of the advantages she
enjoys as a result of her family’s considerable wealth. The Sky Is Pink could only have
been enriched by showing conversations at home that caused Aisha to be so
self aware at such a young age or by delving into the flip sides, if any, of their
improved financial circumstances.
This is not to
suggest at all that the film paints the Chaudharys as flawless creatures – no it
does not. However, an exploration of these points could have given the film
even more depth than it already has.
And depth it
certainly does have. The non-linear narrative is structured in such a way as to
keep The Sky Is Pink from becoming a
maudlin affair. With editor Manas Mittal’s swift, clean cuts, a tempered use of
music and Aisha’s determinedly non-mushy yet realistic narration, Bose manages
to maintain a fine balance of emotions till the very last scene, bringing home
not just what must have been the real Chaudharys’ goal of giving their daughter
and her healthy brother as normal a household as possible, but also reminding
the audience that our world is filled with laughter in the unlikeliest of
places. I confess I was reduced to a sobbing mess at various moments in the
film, but never because of any schmaltzy manipulations by the filmmaker.
The only other
point where the film gets too cute – other than its persistence with “Moose”, “Panda”
and “Giraffe” – is with the closing text. Hearing Aisha speak through The Sky Is Pink is pleasant and
life-affirming, but continuing to use her words even after she has breathed her
last on screen in a beautifully directed scene and even after her last rites comes
across as a shot at cho-chweetness that is a departure from everything else in The Sky Is Pink.
I also felt
slightly uncomfortable at the overt effort to draw viewers to Aisha’s online
presence, through the text in those final minutes directing us to
catch her on YouTube.
The back and forth
in time gets slightly taxing at a couple of places (and I spotted at least one
factual error in the timeline – a clothing brand shop shown to exist in Delhi
before the brand’s stores were launched in India), but these creases are
quickly smoothened out in each case, and the shifts in time always serve to
keep the film even toned.
The Sky Is Pink is as thoughtful with
its sidelights as it is with its central themes. At a time when India’s
religious minorities are under siege, the film unexpectedly discusses a
conversion without resorting to the stereotypes that propagandists have sought
to perpetuate for decades. In a film industry that once inexorably portrayed
Christians as quasi-foreigners, the passing image of a sari-wearing Christian
nun in The Sky Is Pink is
such a refreshing reminder of reality. (Wonder why Bose persisted with the
stereotype in the nun’s language though. “Mother Mary tumhara pain samajhti hai,”
the woman tells Aditi. Bollywood seems oblivious to the fact that a Hindi-bhaashi
among India’s Christians would actually have said: “Maata Mariam tumhara dard samajhti hai.”)
One of many
pathbreaking elements in The Sky Is Pink
is its willingness to bring up that A word that Bollywood at large abjures and
Ali Abbas Zafar’s Sultan just
recently avoided mentioning: abortion. It does so with the same courage Bose
showed in focusing on the sexuality of a woman with a severe disability in the
lovely Margarita With A Straw. Abortion
is discussed in The Sky Is Pink
with the open-mindedness of a genuine pro-choice liberal, that rare
individual who does not pass judgement either on a parent who considers
terminating a pregnancy or a parent for whom that is just not an option. Stand
up and take a bow please, Shonali Bose. Take a bow too, Aditi and Niren, for
not getting Ms Bose to skip this subject, although you must have known that you
would very likely be judged for it by people on both sides of the ideological
aisle.
As Aisha’s illness
takes the Chaudharys from Delhi to London and back, Priyanka Chopra Jonas’
remarkably controlled performance as tiger mom Aditi gives the film a
stillness that belies the constant turmoil unfolding on screen.
Chopra Jonas’ simmering restraint is well matched by Farhan
Akhtar’s solid turn as Mr Dependability, Niren.
Zaira Wasim as
Aisha injects her character’s bio with a cheeriness that is never
over the top. And Rohit Suresh Saraf delivers a mature performance as her
brother Ishaan. Although The Sky Is
Pink is primarily the story of Aditi and Niren, the writers manage to bring
the children alive on screen, imbuing their canvas with warmth sans the
resentment one might expect when one kid requires so much attention from the
parents. While some may find it hard to believe Ishaan’s devotion to Aisha, the
other way of looking at it is that not everyone reacts to the same situation in
precisely the same way. And perhaps the Chaudharys did indeed manage not to
neglect Ishaan despite the demands made on their time by Aisha’s health. If you
know a beloved sibling is bound to die an early death and if your parents were
wise enough to include you in their daily battles, perhaps you too would find
it in you to not grudge your little sister the spotlight in your house.
Large passages of The Sky Is Pink are swaddled in sorrow,
as you might expect, but the film’s stand-out quality is its commitment to
its positivity. Without seeming to try too hard, it is funny, believable
and heart-wrenching all rolled into one. Death in the storyline is as
inevitable as it is for all of us in real life, but what this film does is
to celebrate lives well lived.
Rating (out
of five stars): ***1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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149 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Photographs
courtesy: Treeshul Media
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