My Mirror column:
The film pushes the debate on sexual consent by focusing on women who don't fit into the popular idea of 'good girls'.
There's a scene early on in Pink in which a young woman called Minal Arora (the wonderful Taapsee Pannu) is on her morning jog. Headphones in her ears, she appears to be running in one of South Delhi's many 'colony' parks. As she comes to a halt, panting slightly from the exertion, she suddenly finds herself the object of someone's unwavering gaze. An oldish man sitting on a bench nearby is staring at her. She stares back at him — first warily, then with a rising tide of anger — but he remains unabashed, unflinching. It is she who must move on.
It is one of several scenes in Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's film that reveals that he and his cowriters Shoojit Sircar and Ritesh Shah have grasped something that most Indian men seem quite unable to understand, even when they are ostensibly 'on your side'.
I refer to the extent to which our everyday interactions with the world seem designed to remind women that they live on sufferance. Think of the office colleague who talks to your breasts, or the co-passenger who sidles closer and closer until his hairy arm runs the entire length of yours; the service provider who demands 'extra' because your sense of vulnerability can be milked for money, or the one who insists on speaking to your male partner when you're in the middle of an argument. With every such instance from which we find ourselves forced to 'move on' comes a cumulative recognition: that our imagined freedoms are tightly circumscribed by boundaries not of our making.
It must already be apparent to you that Pink has a strong political message, and it isn't one that a popular Hindi film has ever delivered with such unexpurgated zeal or clarity. Navdeep Singh's NH10 and Pawan Kripalani's Phobia both gave us a sense of women under siege, using different generic registers of horror. In the case of Pink, the ideological content is more sledgehammer (mostly drilled into us by Amitabh Bachchan's finicky, posh-accented, bipolar lawyer Deepak Sehgal). But by splicing the sense of everyday violation together with a tense, thriller-like plot, Pink ensures that even the most uninterested viewer will not be bored.
In an astute storytelling move, the incident around which Pink's plot revolves is never given to us as a whole. Like the 'public' within the film — the nosy neighbours who come out to comment when the police appear in their mohalla, or the finger-pointing boys who refer to it as "woh Suraj Kund kaand" — we piece it together, from snatches of conversation and CCTV footage, from a melting pot of gossip and rumour, police files and court testimony.
Not only does this cinematic technique serve to keep us on our toes, it is also a sharp and subversive way to make us realise how we often arrive at conclusions about events that we have not personally witnessed — based on age-old prejudices and stereotypes about class and gender and morality, aided by the fresh daily grinding of the rumour mill.
There have been other Indian films that have dealt with the public and private aftermath of sexual assault — I think of the 1978 Ghar, in which Vinod Mehra plays the emotionally paralysed husband to Rekha's post-rape traumatised wife, or of Rituparno Ghosh's superb Dahan, in which, too, a young housewife must suffer the consequences of a sexual assault on the street during which her husband was present but unable to help her.
Unlike those films, Pink pushes the ongoing debate about sexual consent to its utmost, by focusing on women who do not fit easily into the popular idea of good girls. The three young women who form the film's tightly-knit core — Kirti Kulhari as Falak, Andrea Tariang as Andrea and Pannu as Minal — are neither innocent and virginal, nor the good wives of ostensibly good men on whose behalf a male audience might feel outraged. They are youthful, independent women who have chosen to live outside the "protection" of their families; they remain daughters and sisters, yes, but are also employees, friends and lovers. They enjoy a drink (or three), they enter freely into relationships with men they like; and they are not easy to slot as victims — because they fight back. By forcing us to contend with these characters in their flawed humanity, Pink shifts the cinematic discourse.
And yet, what are we to make of the fact that the answer to these young women's problems — even in the space of this quite remarkable film — must come from a man, and not just any man but the one who spent the first part of the film intruding so rudely into their space, played by an actor who is the film industry's undisputed patriarch? And though Bachchan's unnerving man from the park turns out to be a saviour in disguise, his 'saving' involves an unnecessarily public recounting of his client's sexual history. Surely there's something to think about there.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Sep 2016.
The film pushes the debate on sexual consent by focusing on women who don't fit into the popular idea of 'good girls'.
There's a scene early on in Pink in which a young woman called Minal Arora (the wonderful Taapsee Pannu) is on her morning jog. Headphones in her ears, she appears to be running in one of South Delhi's many 'colony' parks. As she comes to a halt, panting slightly from the exertion, she suddenly finds herself the object of someone's unwavering gaze. An oldish man sitting on a bench nearby is staring at her. She stares back at him — first warily, then with a rising tide of anger — but he remains unabashed, unflinching. It is she who must move on.
It is one of several scenes in Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's film that reveals that he and his cowriters Shoojit Sircar and Ritesh Shah have grasped something that most Indian men seem quite unable to understand, even when they are ostensibly 'on your side'.
I refer to the extent to which our everyday interactions with the world seem designed to remind women that they live on sufferance. Think of the office colleague who talks to your breasts, or the co-passenger who sidles closer and closer until his hairy arm runs the entire length of yours; the service provider who demands 'extra' because your sense of vulnerability can be milked for money, or the one who insists on speaking to your male partner when you're in the middle of an argument. With every such instance from which we find ourselves forced to 'move on' comes a cumulative recognition: that our imagined freedoms are tightly circumscribed by boundaries not of our making.
It must already be apparent to you that Pink has a strong political message, and it isn't one that a popular Hindi film has ever delivered with such unexpurgated zeal or clarity. Navdeep Singh's NH10 and Pawan Kripalani's Phobia both gave us a sense of women under siege, using different generic registers of horror. In the case of Pink, the ideological content is more sledgehammer (mostly drilled into us by Amitabh Bachchan's finicky, posh-accented, bipolar lawyer Deepak Sehgal). But by splicing the sense of everyday violation together with a tense, thriller-like plot, Pink ensures that even the most uninterested viewer will not be bored.
In an astute storytelling move, the incident around which Pink's plot revolves is never given to us as a whole. Like the 'public' within the film — the nosy neighbours who come out to comment when the police appear in their mohalla, or the finger-pointing boys who refer to it as "woh Suraj Kund kaand" — we piece it together, from snatches of conversation and CCTV footage, from a melting pot of gossip and rumour, police files and court testimony.
Not only does this cinematic technique serve to keep us on our toes, it is also a sharp and subversive way to make us realise how we often arrive at conclusions about events that we have not personally witnessed — based on age-old prejudices and stereotypes about class and gender and morality, aided by the fresh daily grinding of the rumour mill.
There have been other Indian films that have dealt with the public and private aftermath of sexual assault — I think of the 1978 Ghar, in which Vinod Mehra plays the emotionally paralysed husband to Rekha's post-rape traumatised wife, or of Rituparno Ghosh's superb Dahan, in which, too, a young housewife must suffer the consequences of a sexual assault on the street during which her husband was present but unable to help her.
Unlike those films, Pink pushes the ongoing debate about sexual consent to its utmost, by focusing on women who do not fit easily into the popular idea of good girls. The three young women who form the film's tightly-knit core — Kirti Kulhari as Falak, Andrea Tariang as Andrea and Pannu as Minal — are neither innocent and virginal, nor the good wives of ostensibly good men on whose behalf a male audience might feel outraged. They are youthful, independent women who have chosen to live outside the "protection" of their families; they remain daughters and sisters, yes, but are also employees, friends and lovers. They enjoy a drink (or three), they enter freely into relationships with men they like; and they are not easy to slot as victims — because they fight back. By forcing us to contend with these characters in their flawed humanity, Pink shifts the cinematic discourse.
And yet, what are we to make of the fact that the answer to these young women's problems — even in the space of this quite remarkable film — must come from a man, and not just any man but the one who spent the first part of the film intruding so rudely into their space, played by an actor who is the film industry's undisputed patriarch? And though Bachchan's unnerving man from the park turns out to be a saviour in disguise, his 'saving' involves an unnecessarily public recounting of his client's sexual history. Surely there's something to think about there.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Sep 2016.
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