10 Reasons Why Pink Will Make A Difference To The Way We Look At Women
Its producer Shoot Sircar says Pink is the best film he has made so far. And why should we not believe him? This is the guy who gave us the spermal satire Vicky Donor and an entire film on the embarrassing subject of the bowel movement. Yup, Shoojit and the camera share a Piku-liar camaraderie.
Pink has a special sensitive yet strong feel to it. It is about the life of a bunch of urban women. But it is not delicate, fragile and tender. It is a film that asks tough questions about how the Male Gaze falls on women in the cities just because they were clothes that flatter their figure and draw attention to the contours of their physicality.Should we ogle and leer just because women have been subjected to lustful lookovers from the time Raavan’s raunchy gaze fell on Sita?
Pink offers us a gallery of gorgeous women . But Tapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari and Andrea Tariang are not used to evoke seductive sighs. They are there for a definite purpose of portraying a gender condition . Once the film opens we will know how directors can stop objectifying women without making them lose their sharp edges.Chiknichameli can go fly a kite, preferably in Gujarat.
AmitabhBachchan playing a shrewd lawyer asks Tapsee some uncomfortable squirmy questions in the courtroom. This is not to evoke cheesy titillation but to show what girls have to go through in court in sexual cases. This is the first time in his entire career that the Big B has spoken sexually loaded lines. He loved every word his character had to utter.He believed in his character’s dialogues.
The film will take Tapsee Pannu to a new level in her career. She is THAT good as a girl who won’t take leery male attention lying down. Says Shoojit, “Once Tapsee came on the sets with a cold and mild fever. I told her not to take medication,. She was shocked. But I wanted that look of distant distress that a fever brings on us. I told her she looked absolutely right for the role. Her parents wondered what sort of a film I had made.” They will soon know.
The film’s director Annirudh Roychoudhury comes to us in Hindi cinema with a vast repertoire of Bengali films behind him. Annirudh’s first Anuranan and second film Antaheen explored complex psychological relationships among urban characters the way Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Musafir and Anupama had done. This director brings toBollywood a Bangla sensibility. He could be the the new Hrishikesh Mukherjee in tinsel town.
The boxoffice favours powerful realistic films this year. The biggest hits of 2016 so far are Airlift, Neerja andSultan. All three are inspired by real-life characters and feature protagonists facing a crisis ripped open from a chapter in life. Pink is in the same league.
AmitabhBachchan is still one of his kind. In Pink he plays one of the toughest roles of his lengthy career. Every word he utters is the truth. Every line he throws in the court has a ring of lived-in veracity. The arguments in the courtroom are all culled from real-life cases extensively researched by a team of legal experts that Pink had hired.
With the two films this week Baar Baar Dekho and Freaky Friday bombing at the boxoffice Pink promises to get in an audience famished for films that sing a real song.
The title Pink has a colour correctness about it. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black clicked. Tony D’Souza’s Blueand the recent Malayalam film White flopped. About time the cult of colour correct titles got back into the ‘Pink’ of health.
