--Next time lock the door--. Review on Page 3 - Bollywood

“Next time – Lock the door” the perfectly timed one liner delivered by Madhavi Sharma in the final moments of the movie to a gay friend who betrayed her, is a brilliant spark of the director’s ability to put the most serious and tough scenes in a cracking way and yet without losing the sensitivity. In this scene, though an instant smile appears on everyone’s face, it also somewhere injects sermons of pain in our soul.

Of late I read India today surveys about sex and youth in metros that are meant to shake the values of Indian culture and traditions. They produce shocking reports and results that are sometimes too much hard to believe. Initially as I wasn’t born and brought up in a metro, thought that these surveys had fake numbers and they are doing this just to increase the sales of their magazines but after watching this movie, I doubt the condition may be even worse than what was reported in the magazine, so much was the impact of the movie on me.

Issues

One needs lot of guts to take up such a sensitive subject and proceed till the end without any compromises. But this guy Madhur Bhandarkar has got that guts to step into an arena to which no other current film makers have gone before. Madhu peels of the real skin of the popular figures and celebrities and harshly bashes upon this party culture and the associated evils prevailing mostly in the metropolitan cities. He didn’t leave behind any single issue. Casting couch, homo sexual, child abuse, premarital sex, drug addiction, external affairs after marriage etc., has been handled with utmost sensitivity and care.

Links and Plots

Madhavi Sharma (played by Konkana Sen) the Page 3 journalist is the mouth piece of the director’s thoughts and opinions about this pretentious high class society people. Everything that we see on screen is from the perspective of Madhavi. After “Phir Milenege”, we get to see a very practical and an ordinary woman who equally faces both success and failure in her personal and private life like any of the present generation working woman. The three girls Madhavi (journalist), Pearl (Air hostess), Gayathri (dreamer of becoming bollywood star) are the reel shadows of real life images. The entire story is carefully wound around these three girls. Though there is no any big story line as such to be narrated, Madhavi is the common point to which various sub plots dealing with various above said problems are linked.

Screenplay

Writing screenplay for this movie should have been a very tedious job. There are lot of characters need to be introduced, their characteristics need to be informed and so has to compose quick and brief scenes in the noisy party atmosphere that accomplish both these tasks. And above all, he has to connect all the subplots carefully, believably and also coherently. It is very difficult to make an entertaining and thought provoking movie with such disgusting and embarrassing issues, if the pace of the movie slightly slips off, people would ignore the movie saying it as a documentary which is what actually happened to “Swades”, but Madhu has managed it successfully with his brilliantly structured screenplay.

The conversations and the one liner are excellent and he doesn’t go overboard and preach anything through his dialogues and that maintains the realistic tone of the movie. Not even a single moment in the movie is boring even though there are no any commercial elements. But I should not mention it because we have all sleaze skin show and item numbers which we usually call as commercial elements in this movie too but for the first time, they are a part of the narrative, unavoidable and convincingly placed, as and when demanded by the script.

If I have to list some of the well executed scenes from the movie, then I have to mention about every single scene but anyway here are some of the touching and ground breaking moments from the movie.

The lively and emotional scenes that portrays the deep love between three friends like when Pearl (Air hostess) and Madhavi part and when Pearl bursts out in the hospital seeing the pathetic situation of Gayatri. The performances of all three girls were extraordinary in these scenes.

The professional bonding between Madhavi Sharma and her boss (The Editor) has been brought out well. The scene in which Madhavi receives the resignation letter from her helpless boss is well crafted one with fewer dialogues and more expressions.

The bomb blast scene was one of the most realistically captured scenes of the movie like that of in the movie “Bombay”. The entire episode was shocking and makes the audience feel as if they are one of the people on the streets watching the proceedings.

The scenes following the death of Anjali Thapar is yet another place where he hits the bulls eyes with the striking reality, it shows how materialistic the world and the so called high class society people have become.

On a lighter vain, the conversations of car drivers of the celebrities are really funny. And one more funny directorial touch can be seen in the last party scene where you can see so many new NRI’s are roaming around the party giving their visiting cards to all other celebrities over there and also one to the NRI whom we saw in the very first scene who was also in the same situation as these new guys one year before.

The climax is well handled showing the various illegal relationships existing in the pretentious high class society and the way Madhavi manages the shocking reversals in relationships with controlled reactions and emotions of Madhavi is worth mentioning and the director ends the movie with a despair of changing the society. And that makes the climax as realistic as it could be.

Casting

Casting is another important aspect of the movie. Except Konkana Sen and Atul Kulkarni, I don’t know the names of any other actors in the movie. Every one of them has performed well and has given a fresh life to the characters and looks like person that we meet in every day life. Konkana Sen has got expressive eyes and by utilizing she really does a great job in this role.

Technicalities

Cinematography is raw, realistic and just perfect in getting us involved with the proceedings. Editing is excellent because of which such a narration has got momentum and grip. Songs gel well with the movie but the background score is old fashioned and sounds melodramatic for a realistic film.

I have only two questions. How that is in all parties, the same sets of celebrities are focused? It adds monotony to all those party sequences in the first half. Also everybody seems to know the journalist Madhavi, is in real the journalists are so popular among the celebrities?

Anyway on the whole, Page 3 is a neat movie with an offbeat theme that has got both sensitivity and entertainment bagged in it. I am very happy that it is the biggest hit (commercial) of the year, so far which may give confidence for more aspiring creators on this line.