Piku ***
Dir: Shoojit Sircar.
With: Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Irrfan Khan. 123 mins. Cert: PG
The subtitle of this
current Bollywood hit, “From Motion Comes Emotion”, has the ring of a terse
Godardian credo, so it’s a shock to learn exactly what kind of motion is meant:
few movies have so tied themselves to a character’s bowel movements. Shoojit
Sircar’s comedy-drama flouts cinematic loo taboo by organising itself around a figure,
Amitabh Bachchan’s Bashkor Banerji, who – for constitutional reasons – rarely
travels more than five feet from one. It sounds crazy, like a pitch from the
Prune Marketing Board, yet Sircar makes of this constipation both a theme and a
virtue: he takes an everyday set-up, and then, as it were, follows through on
it.
In Bashkor’s Delhi
household, everybody’s uptight for one reason or another; the dietary
discomfort of this widowed hypochondriac is rivalled only by the burden borne
by architect daughter Piku (Deepika Padukone). Sircar gleefully establishes how
father’s bowels impact upon daughter’s career (pungent status updates disrupt
her meetings) and love life (such potty talk repels potential suitors). She
retains one unlikely admirer: Rana (Irrfan Khan), manager of a hire-car fleet
with whom Piku has been involved in a legal tussle ever since her vehicle was
rear-ended. Crude as this sounds, an idea is being developed here.
Much of the action
takes place in small rooms, and what’s immediately striking is that these
characters don’t inhabit the palatial outposts so beloved of Hindi cinema, but
cramped middle- or working-class boltholes, obliging these characters to put up
with one another’s BS (or just S). Even when the film contrives a reason for the
principals to hit the road to Kolkata, we’re still essentially watching three
people sharing a confined space, trying to hold their feelings in until the
next pit stop – and that road, necessitating frequent twists and turns, is
itself surely intended as in some way intestinal. Motion, again, leads to
emotion.
Given the torrent of
oversharing with which the film opens, it’s clear that Sircar isn’t afraid of
nitty-gritty intimacy, and he works closely with his leads to locate the grace
notes in this potentially cruddy material. You can feel the film loosening up,
relaxing into their company: where Bachchan seizes upon his cranky character
part, making Bashkor as garrulously funny in his theories on caste and marriage
as his system is backed-up, a dressed-down Padukone, the sometime model
traditionally cast as a living goddess, does as much here with a frazzled
silence as her earlier showcases did with her dazzle.
Arguably, though,
it’s the terrific Khan (Life of Pi)
who steals it, working subtle comic wonders with wry looks, and delivering the
easier-digestion editorial with greater charm than, say, Gillian McKeith ever
managed. Star power aside, it’s a modest, reined-in entertainment, rejecting
musical numbers for a simple whistled refrain, and clocking in at just two
hours; its last-act crisis involves nothing more spectacular than blocked
plumbing, inevitably. Yet given the bloated junk currently clogging both Hindi
and American mainstreams, such human-sensitive fare provides its own
restorative, oddly pleasurable form of release. It slips down nicely.
Piku is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
