PadMan is a brave, heartfelt attempt
Ayoung girl is teasing her brother and runs away horrified when she sees a sanitary napkin in his hands. A loving wife is scandalised by her husband’s ‘obsession with women’s problems’. Schoolgirls are told to stay home when they have their period, and slink into a corner, embarrassed. It all starts out on a familiar note of shared queasiness. The mastery of PadMan is that by the end of the movie, the pad is just a stretch of cotton, the period is just a time of month, and that familiar queasiness is gone.
R Balki’s much-hyped film is based on the real-life story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, called India’s Menstrual Man for creating pads so cheap that women in rural India could finally do away with the rags, sand and leaves they had been using.
In the film, the character is renamed Lakshmikant Chauhan and played by Akshay Kumar. He’s a school dropout, a mechanic, newly married and smitten by his wife, Gayatri (Radhika Apte). When he realises the problems she’s having during her period, and the stuff she’s been using, he is horrified and decides to act.
PadMan starts off slow; there’s quite a bit of posturing and hectoring as it sets Chauhan up as the good guy. But it delivers its robust message so well that you can forgive the intervals of melodrama and occasional dragging pace. The film forces you to look at the big picture. It confronts the sense of shame surrounding menstruation head-on in a way that can feel truly liberating. As Chauhan tries different formulas and analyses their effectiveness, there is a normalisation of menstruation that, once again, makes the heart lift.
Much of the credit for this goes to co-writers Balki and Swanand Kirkire, who have pulled off the unenviable task of tackling a taboo in a mainstream film in a manner that makes it watchable and yet impactful.
Sonam Kapoor enters the narrative quite late, but injects charm into every frame she inhabits. While Kapoor takes to her role of a privileged South Delhi girl with perfect ease, Kumar’s accent and tone are inconsistent. The supporting cast is quite simply, not good.