Pink Overview

                               Pink (2016)

Directed By: Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury

Story & Screenplay: Ritesh Shah

Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari, Andrea Tariang, Piyush Mishra

“Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye To Kya Hai?” Minal (Taapsee), while suffering with the state of paranoia and bewilderment in her voyage through the prison cell and courtroom, must have heard this song, ricocheting in her mind palace. Or I can just assume that.

It’s a force in sync, a hyperbole decry against a victim of prejudiced cascade, that satisfies the unscratched itch of a tub-thumper or the plaintiff’s advocate (Piyush), in this case. His antagonist, Deepak (Amitabh) relies heavily on the shredded boundary that has kept his diving heart, still afloat: his dying wife. That wrath which appears as an aftermath to a helpless condition was waiting to burst out. That agony which absorbs the spongy mind, following a traumatic experience had already seeped through his aura. The former could be seen as a hustler, in the courtroom, and the latter - as the ethics calculators define it - a licentious being. They bark against each other. Condescending attitude flows parallel with them. They raise different glasses in the honour of their cause. But the occasion and the champagne remains the same. We get to know that they are advocates. The question that the director wants us to answer is - Who is the devil? (With a metaphorical sidekick) Who gets to be awarded as ‘The Devil’s Advocate’?

'Evil' is a questionable word. A continuum of Red and Black. The motive of the girls’ (Taapsee, Kirti, Andrea) search for leisure or the guys’ underhand impressions for pleasure. The free will to live or man’s age old tradition of deriving a woman’s clandestine desire. Perhaps, Zarathustra would have been a better advocate-cum-judge in this quest; but our courts are devoid of Nietzsche and replete with judges, scanning facts and figures.

The trio of the beautiful (perception, mind you) victims, or the “normal working” women [whatever that means] had enacted their characters in a good fashion. Not great, as you can sense it with nearly every Bollywood movie. Nearly. The director, a B-town debutant has worked on visualising an escalating scenario on our screens with an impact akin to that of the Sonam Kapoor starrer Neerja. Call it my prejudiced aspiration, but considering that he belongs to the land of the legendary Satyajit Ray and performs the same profession which Ray did, I was waiting for moments where I could pleasantly whisper, ‘WOW!’…I mean, the mainstream audience should be introduced with the epiphany, which veterans like Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese, and layman like the writer of this article, experienced when they watched the classic: Pather Panchali.

Piyush Mishra is a poet by heart. The crux of a poet is the rhythm of the underlying waves inside the senses, obtained as a result of manifestations that the body experience. The ebb or the upswing of this rhythm, determine the poet’s mood. In Pink, I caught Mishra swimming in the same rhythm as he did in Anurag Kashyap’s classic, Gulaal. As if Prithvi Bana left the turbulent abode of Rajputana to portray the criminal lawyer in Pink. Amitabh Bachchan, is the figure who seems to understand the analogy in character enactment and the architecture of the same, at the seven-score of his life. Still lacks the savageness of on-screen Manoj Bajpayee, but if someone hails the former as his/her favourite actor, I would comprehend with his decision.

  

Like a blithe in the alfresco air, maybe the producers demanded it or the director felt the same tinge of emotions that Manuel Neuer felt before challenging Leo Messi in the Champions League match (2014-15), that after the movie finishes, the actual scenes of the infamous incident upon which the plot of the movie revolves, is displayed to the audience in coherence with the ending credits. Note that, the cinematic element of this movie lies in the hidden truth, in the absconding tradecraft of the protagonists and the antagonists and in the final judgment of the viewers. The ending display stitched a glitch in the impact of the movie, unlike Talvar and much like Morgan Freeman’s narration at the end of David Fincher’s thriller: Se7en.  

    

Overall, Pink is a movie which exhibits the storyline, much loved by (stereotypical) feminists and is controversial for pragmatists. For a cinema lover, Pink is a movie you must watch at least once, either for the sake of changes in movie-making scenario in Bollywood or you could taste the sugar of unified dismay towards the guilty actions against women and praise the film-makers.