Sep 25, 2016 11:28 AM
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Shoojit Sircar of Piku fame teams up again with Big Baritone to produce a topical hit that has earned critical acclaim, as well as 35 Crores at the BO in its first week already.
Three promiscuous, working girls staying in a rented apartment in posh South Delhi go for dinner to a secluded Surajkund resort with some boys they’ve just met at a rock show. The boys assume the girls are soft target since they dress skimpily, drink, stay alone and tell porn jokes as well as any.
As they pounce on their prey in the lonely resort, one of the girls, Minal, retaliates, smashing a bottle on a boy’s head. The girls manage to escape, but are hounded by the boys, who happen to be well connected to an MLA. Threats, physical abuse, including molestation in a moving car(the favorite haunt of Delhi voyeurs, ) add to the ensuing trauma the hapless girls are forced to undergo. Impotent society at large, an amenable police, and the parasitic legal system all conspire to let the girls slide into despair and gloom.
Things reach a head when the girls lodge an FIR against the boys. The boys too retaliate by lodging a return FIR, alleging a prostitution racket gone badly, and an attempt to murder. Minal gets arrested, and thereafter the movie is about their tipping over the edge, till a messiah in the form of a talented ex-lawyer comes to their rescue, after everyone has deserted them.
Big B, with his bipolar disorder, baritone drawl and sedatives, looks so frail and vulnerable that it’s hard to fancy him a firebrand lawyer with all the punchlines. The great Panjandrum of theatrics sets himself up at his favorite vantage point, with his air of supererogatory courtesy, delivering long monologues on morality, defying social mores, and spelling out his wonder Safety Manual for Women. I wonder why we cannot find talent to step into the man’s shoes. As long as he’s around, no middle-aged actor may aspire to find any meaningful roles in Indian cinema, which seem to have all been gobbled up by his voracious appetite for fame and money – no wonder – since he still is the breadwinner of his family.
The prosecution counsel makes a fine show of hamming and breathless dialog delivery – I guess, as an excuse for being overwhelmed with the travesty of justice his clients are suffering. The judge, with his quivering voice, moist eyes and trembling hands, had better been off on a Delhi park bench soaking up from an inhaler. The girls are eminently watchable, and the tormentors, as passable and morose as they come.
The plot is predictable from the first moment uncle AB appears gaping on the screen, minding the poor girls’ business. The scenes are a list of typical newspaper headlines concerning girls in Delhi-NCR region, where any female in short skirts, or after dark, is considered meat on the plate. Delhi, a melting pot of the most violent and feudal communities of India that surround it – the Jats with their Khaps, the criminalized Biharis, the belligerent Sikhs, and the philistine Bhojpuris – provides a very scary and hazardous environ for women.
It’s all right to be aware of western ideals, but practicing them in a place like Delhi is foolhardiness: as if speeding a low hung Ferrari on our potholed roads – in no time the machine will be nursing its wounds in a garage. A word of caution for the girls who’ve watched AB’s prescription Safety Manual in PINK and are feeling very brave that they too can dress in skirts, hold a drink, swing a leg and dance with the bad boys in farmhouses in Surajkund: How many of them will find a messiah like AB to do pro bono work to save their reckless asses?
So, watch Pink with seatbelts on, girls. In the end, it's not so dramatic; and in real life, no poetic justice gets done. Make your choices wisely; do in Rome as the….
