Poet Majaz Lakhnawi wrote once,
“Yeh tera zard rukh yeh khushk lab yeh waham, yeh wahshat..
Tu apne sar se yeh baadal hata leti to accha tha..
Tere maathe pe yeh aanchal bahot hi khoob hai lekin..
Tu is aanchal se ek parcham bana leti to accha tha..”
(Your pale face, your parched lips..these doubts..this fear..
If only you could banish the dark cloud hovering above you..
This veil you cover your head with..
If only you could turn it into a banner (of freedom, of rebellion)
Kaifi famously said this to every woman
“Tu haqeeqat bhi hai dilchasp kahani hi nahin
teri hasti bhi hai ik cheez jawani hi nahin
apni tareekh ka unwaan badalna hai tujhe
uth meri jaan mere saath hi chalna hai tujhe.”
(You are a living truth..not just an interesting story
You have selfhood, not just a body
You have to rewrite your destiny, your history
Rise because you have to walk not behind but with me)
Why I remembered these poems while watching Pink is because sometimes great feminist statements can come from men. Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink almost joins the ranks of such statements except for one little flaw. Despite making hugely important points about a woman’s right to say ‘No’ and about her volition over her body and choices, and after the intense build up surrounding three independent women recovering from a horrifying night, the narrative quickly is turned over totally to the men.
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Except for Kirti Kulhari’s reactive big retort on the phone where she challenges the men out for revenge and Taapsee Pannu’s answer to a threatening phone call, most of the dialogue belongs to the lawyers attacking and defending the girls. Infact Taapsee had more space to show her spunk in that one scene in the testosterone smeared Baby, when Akshay rushes in to rescue her and she towers over the vanquished villain and wipes some blood off her lip than she does in this entire film which was meant to be about powerful women though there is that bit about a smashed bottle in a moment of grave provocation.
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There are also clear references drawn from the 1988 Hollywood drama The Accused, where the victim of a sexual crime was hemmed in a box and forced to defend her character, her life style and her choices till she screamed and said that she had said, “No.” And that “No” should have been enough to defend her against the crime but wasn’t. And this..the most powerful argument in the film was made by the survivor. Not apologetically. But loudly. And through her ordeal she never lost sight of what she wanted. Justice. She never stopped asking for it. We heard her voice rise above the slut shaming and mud smearing again and again and again. And call it tokenism but her lawyer was a woman too.
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Here, Taapsee’s Minal, Kirti Kulhari’s Falak and Andrea Tariang do a great job of being supportive of each other but in the final analysis are not game changers because the onus to do that lies with the man who stands up for them. Andrea Tariang has just one memorable line, “As a girl from the North-East, I am targetted more than the average girl on the street, ” (or something to that effect) while Kirti’s big outburst infact compromises the girls’ integrity even though she justifies it as a reaction to the goading she is put through in the witness stand. It is also hard to understand why the court case addresses just the injury to the boy and nobody brings up even once the revenge assault the girl in question suffered in a moving car. Also in the era of digital doctoring, a girl is fired from her job for supposedly offering sexual favours online and she says nothing except, “I know how it is?”
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So yes, the women in the film are tragically ineffectual. The only woman in power, a Haryanvi SHO is corrupt and another police woman meekly watching the proceedings in the court room, in the end shakes the lawyer’s hand, not the survivor’s. Even the judge in the film is a man, the ever wonderful Dhritiman Chaterji. Again, nothing wrong with that but we needed to see one reassuringly eloquent woman in the film. There is not one memorable dialogue mouthed in the courtroom by the women and the fact that a supposedly feminist film was summed up by a mainstream site with this headline, “Why Amitabh Bachchan starrer Pink is an important film for feminism in India,” shows us just how far we are from understanding that women need to be given space in their own stories. Even Rajkumar Santoshi’s overwrought Daamini from where Pink draws the reluctant lawyer who comes out of voluntary retirement to fight once again for a woman, had a final bravura statement by the female protagonist. No such luck here. The closing arguments are made only by the men and the women simply sit in the background, waiting to be told their fate. Taapsee and Kirti are wonderful actors and one wishes to God, they had more to do than just to look cornered, angry and helpless. Angad Bedi is surprisingly effective as an entitled boor.
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That said, this is Amitabh Bachchan’s finest performance in years and even when he is doing nothing except sitting immovably in his chair or zoning out of the present with a glazed gaze and sudden silences stemming from a psychological disorder, he tugs at your heart, reminding you of the power he still has over our emotions, our mindspace. There will never be another actor perhaps capable of evoking the amount of love he does. And you remember wistfully the days when his entry in a film’s frame was greeted with whistles when in a pivotal moment of this film, he turns up wordlessly on a doorstep in a lawyer’s coat. And he is possibly the last of the actors who know the power of the written word and the deliciousness of a well-crafted line as he swirls it in his mouth. Also few actors can read poetry (in this case Tanveer Ghazi’s work..not as good as Kaifi or Majaaz or Sahir but still head and shoulders above what passes as verse in our films these days) like he does. He is in his element in Pink and it is just unfortunate that we do not have a female counterpart in our cinema who can command as much screen space as he can.
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Ritesh Shah’s writing says many meaningful things about the world that denies women their humanity, the freedom to laugh, to socialise, to dress the way they want, to have sexual freedom, to walk and run and drink and to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and Bachchan delivers his lines about the safety manual for women written by men with scathing restraint and obvious investment. There are also moving insights into old age, the finality of loneliness and death as we see Bachchan’s silhouette in scene after scene framed against the quiet nothingness of his empty house. Mamta Shankar has a small but poignant cameo and Vinod Nagpal as the genial landlord brings back the memory of Hum Log where he was a bitter, acerbic patriarch. The film also effectively brings out the sense of insecurity and constant watchfulness that women have to deal with every single day when they step out of their homes and sometimes even when they are at home, trying to shut out a curious neighbour, an intrusive phone call. This is a good film, crisply edited (by Bodhaditya Banerjee) with a great musical score by Anupam Roy and Shantanu Moitra. Abhik Mukhopadhyay’s cinematography is atmospheric as it captures a city’s impersonal bleakness. The only issue is that its treatment favours not the women the film is supposed to be about but those who are defending them.
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Reema Moudgil is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US and is now retailing some of her art at http://paintcollar.com/reema. She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.
