Piku: Ray Would Have Approved

Satyajit Ray would have approved (if you disregard the product placements). Shoojit Sarkar goes back to his roots literally and cinematically with Piku, a film about nothing in particular when it trundles, carrying a baggage of eccentricity and family history from Delhi to Kolkata in a taxi. But in retrospect, it is about the little things that make up our lives and relationships. It shows us without seeming to, why it is important to be present in a moment with those we love, no matter how challenging they are, because only when we are present can we look back without regret.

The film opens with intimate glimpses of a household in the throes of a difficult morning, topped by the complaints of a constipated patriarch while the daughter starts the day’s washing and tries to keep her sanity. And yes, there is the Satyajit Ray portrait the entrance. A Jamini Roy or two. Truckloads of books and medicines, sounds of cooking and life as it unfolds in your home and mine.

Ray is also resurrected in the way Shoojit captures the momentousness of seemingly insignificant moments. When Deepika Padukone’s luminous Piku looks out from her family home’s window at a bunch of young girls and perhaps recalls her own childhood; when she sits on the steps of a ghat in Benaras, trying to find her centre; when she is clicking the restful landscape from the window of her taxi, in an attempt to escape the suffocating confines of her life. We see the close-up shots of food the family eats, the books they read. We see a beautiful sunset lighting up a chair with a commode on top of a taxi and realise that life can be beautiful in the most unlikely of situations. As when a hypochondriac old man cycles with the wonderstruck eyes of a child through the streets of his youth,  he watches a young girl play harmonium through a window, makes his way through traffic, eats kachauris and jalebis at a hole-in-the-wall stall and for once, the overwhelming preoccupation with death and disease leaves him. These little moments of joy, we learn, make the sum of life.  Not the suffering, not the constant carping about blood pressure, the connect between “motion and emotion’’ but what we choose to see and experience on any given day.

Shoojit also gives us perhaps the most unheroic Amitabh Bachchan we have ever seen. This old man has a paunch, shaggy grey hair, eyes that are lost, stubborn, insecure and curious in turns, and he is a nuisance to every one he meets because his universe revolves around his intestines and their functioning. He clings on to his daughter, swatting any opportunity she has of connecting with a man, though he has no issues with her sexual encounters as long as they don’t turn serious and take her away from him.

She is his go-to girl and through constant bickering, the two remain inseparable, with Piku defending him stubbornly when Irrfan Khan as her accidental co-traveller points out that he is a selfish man. Says she, “Ek waqt ke baad ma baap apne aap zinda nahin reh sakte..unhe zinda rakhna padta hai.’’ And that is why she plays along with his tantrums, checking his perfect BP, putting up with his overcritical, controlling ways and even agreeing to a road trip from Delhi to Kolkata. Despite the veneer of irritation Piku wears most of the time, it only takes her father breaking into a song to melt her. Watch her well up the moment he is a bit out of sorts and you know Deepika has grown immensely as a performer. She is no longer playing to the camera. She is living a character. She is Piku with her fiery kohl-lined eyes, tumultuous hair, unconscious mannerisms and gloriously expressive face that mirrors her life with all its complications and sudden bursts of sunshine. Yes, Ray would have approved. Irrfan as the man she grudgingly turns to for some relief and companionship, is fantastic whether he is watching father and daughter disbelievingly or fixing an antique Tullu pump in a Kolkata home.

Bachchan revisits Anand’s Babu Moshai as a septuagenarian Bhaskar Bannerji and paints old age with all its challenges and irritating self-absorption. Watch him as he watches the casual flow of conversation between Piku and Irrfan’s Rana, scared that somehow this conversation will lead the two into dangerous territory. His Bengali accent slips in places but he is still the pivot of the film. A reminder that we have parents who are as demanding or will be and will need to be loved as unconditionally as they loved us. Mousami Chatterjee is as spunky as ever and Piku is a wonderful study of relationships and is possibly the finest Hindi film ever made on the father-daughter relationship.

 with The New Indian Express  Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of  Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and  where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and  just be silent with her cats.