A very important film about our collective biases Pink
Director: Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Tapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari and Andrea Tariang How many films have you seen where you forget you are watching a film, where the line dividing the audience from the characters get so blurred as to make the distinction almost redundant?
Pink sucks us so deep into its characters’ lives that we come away breathess and anxious.
In Meenal (Taapsee Pannu), Falak (Kirti Kilhari) and Andrea (Andrea Tariang), I saw all our daughters, grappling with the befuddled notions of “What Men Can Do, What Women Can’t Do” and what happens when women do what men say, women can’t do.
Pink is a very important film, and not only because it addresses gender issues with such caustic elan, biting away at patriarchal prejudices with such skill and efficiency that we don’t even realise how much of the indictment the narrative presents against patriarchal bullying.
It all comes out in a tumble in a rousing courtroom finale where the aging but still sharp lawyer Deepak Sehgal (Amitabh Bachchan) with a dying wife (Mamata Shankar) in the hospital, provokes the spoilt rich politician’s scion (Angad Bedi, sufficiently credible) to say why it is okay to force yourself on a certain type of “loose” women even if they say no to your advances.
But then here’s where the narrative plays out a greatest lesson without glee or glory: when a woman says no to sex, it is a no.
Pink takes us beyond, far beyond, black and white, and away from the comfort zone, into an area of exposition on gender discrimination where it is hard to deify the victims and demonize the aggressors. This is where this film scores much higher than other remarkable treatise on Sex & The Single Girl.
The three protagonists in Pink are no lip- biting, sympathy- seeking, urban cowgirls. They have their weaknesses, their blind spots. They like their fun. But must they pay for it?
They stand up to that one truth which the Big B’s legal rhetorics help us ingest: a girl can be any way she wants to be. She could have sex with as many partners as she likes. She still has full authority over her body. So the next time a guy thinks a woman is of “that sort”, he should think again.
Pink grabs our collective biases and age-old notions about permissible boundaries for feminine behaviour by the shoulder and shakes them hard. This a film that can change gender equations in our society.
Ritesh Shah’s dialogues question flagrantly patri- archal values with cool authority. Big B’s sardonic arguments in the courtroom are specially edgy and devastating.
Each actor big or small brings vast credibility to his or her part. The neglected Kirti Kulhari comes into her own as Falak with a lot to conceal in her life.
Kulhari plays the character with such moral equity she leaves us no room to judge her blemishes. Her breakdown in the courtroom will shake every member of the audience, man, woman or child.
In contrast, Taapsee, who plays the main target of gender assault, sheds no tears. She conveys her character’s textured torment with an austerity of expression that is remarkable. Andrea as the girl from Meghalaya who gets caught in the vortex of a murky scandal is the portrait of vulnerability.
But it is finally Bachchan who holds the key to this remarkable film’s incontestable power and efficacy. He is the voice of reason and the conscience of a morality tale where right and wrong are not easily identifiable. Yet when he sets forth reasons as to why a no from a woman means no, we are looking not at a rousing courtroom performance but a voice that ricochets through generations of patriarchal smugness. IANS