It would be no exaggeration to say Pink, which clocks 9 years on September 16, is one of the most influential Hindi films of this century. The ‘No Means No’ anthem resonates in all debates the ink sucks us so deep into its characters’ lives that we come away breathless and anxious. For almost ten minutes after the end-titles I couldn’t move from my seat. I had just seen what three Delhi girls had gone through because they decided to have a fun night out after a rock concert with some boys. In Meenal (Taapsee Pannu), Falak (Kirti Kulhari) and Andrea (Andrea Tariang) I saw all our daughters, grappling with the befuddled notions of What Men Can Do, What Women Can’t Do and what happens when women do what men say, women can’t do.
Pink is a very important film, and not only because it addresses gender issues with such caustic elan, biting away at patriarchal prejudices with such skill and efficiency that we don’t even realize how much of the indictment the narrative presents against patriarchal bullying.
It all comes out in a tumble in a rousing courtroom finale where the aging but still sharp lawyer Deepak Sahgal (Amitabh Bachchan) with a dying wife (Mamata Shankar) in the hospital, provokes the spoiled rich politician’s scion (Angad Bedi, sufficiently credible) to say why it is okay to force yourself on a certain type of “loose” women even if they say no to your advances.
But then here’s where the narrative plays out greatest lesson without glee or glory: when a woman says no to sex, it is no.
Period. So stop right there. Just because that girl you’ve been staring at for much more than 14 seconds is wearing a short skirt and laughing loudly and drinking and cracking a dirty joke at a party where “nice” girls are not allowed, it doesn’t mean she can be forced to have sex with you.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to draw sharply polarized moral sides in the battle between the victims and the predators, the three hapless Delhi girls and their lecherous uncivil hedonistic attackers…that would have been the film which director Aniruddha Roy Choudhuri could have made if he wanted his film and the audience to remain in the comfort zone.
Pink takes us beyond, far beyond, black and white. Into an area of exposition on gender discrimination where it is hard to deify the victims and demonize the aggressors. This is where this film scores much higher than other remarkable treatise on Sex & The Single Girl. The three protagonists in Pink are no lip-biting sympathy-seeking urban cowgirls. They’ve their weaknesses, their blind spots. They like their fun. But must they pay for it?
They stand up to that one truth which the Big B’s legal rhetoric helps us ingest: a girl can be any way she wants to be. She could have sex with as many partners as she likes. She still has full authority over her body. So next time a guy thinks a woman is of “that sort” he should think again.
Pink grabs our collective biases and age-old notions about permissible boundaries for feminine behaviour by the shoulder and shakes them hard. This a film that can change gender equations in our society. The first-half creates an atmosphere of terror through little scenes that convey so much of the truth about gender inequality and sexual politics without sweating over the drama generated in cinema of this sort. The background score is minimal and mellow, almost scoffing at our perception of High Drama associated with cinema on male oppression. Aveek Mukhopadhyay’s camerawork is so majestically unobtrusive it takes us into the heart of Delhi without getting emotionally drenched in the journey.
The narrative is constantly in a hurry to get on with the story. Yet there are poignant pauses in the plot… like the time when Mr Bachchan and Taapsee are jogging she covers her face with her jacket’s hood after a passerby makes a comment, and he uncovers it.
Ritesh Shah’s dialogues question flagrantly patriarchal values with cool authority. Mr Bachchan’s sardonic arguments in the courtroom are specially edgy and devastating.
This brings us to the performances. Each actor big or small brings such vast amounts of credibility to his or her part that you are left with a feeling of having witnessed a surge of unostentatious excellence. The neglected Kirti Kulhari comes into her own as Falak with a lot to conceal in her life. Kulhari plays the character with such moral equity she leaves us no room to judge her blemishes. Her breakdown in the courtroom will shake every member of the audience, man, woman, or child.
In contrast Taapsee Pannu who plays the main target of gender assault sheds no tears. She conveys her character’s textured torment with an austerity of expression that is remarkable. Andrea as the girl from Meghalaya who gets caught in the vortex of a murky scandal is the portrait of vulnerability.
But it is finally the mighty Bachchan who holds the key to this remarkable film’s incontestable power and efficacy. He is the voice of reason and the conscience of a morality tale where right and wrong are not easily identifiable. Yet, when he sets forth reasons as to why a no from a woman means no, we are looking not at a rousing courtroom performance but a voice that ricochets through generations of patriarchal smugness.
Pink offers us no easy comforting solutions to the issue of women’s safety. Should a city girl feel safe with a guy who is well-dressed and from a well-to-do family? Is it okay to be friendly with a man a girl hardly knows? Pink poses questions and leaves the answers hovering in the sphere of intangibility. Gripping from the word go Pink possesses an emotional velocity regarding the theme of violating a woman’s private space that we last saw in Tapan Sinha’s Adalat O Ekti Meye. That was 31 years ago.
As we can see in Pink things haven’t changed much over the years for women in this country. Gosh, is Pink the best film we’ll see. It probably is. So don’t even think about giving it a miss.
Don’t walk out during the end-titles you will miss out on two vital experience. Of knowing what really happened “that night” and of hearing the Bachchan baritone recite Tanveer Qausi’s powerful poetry on feminine awakening.
Shoojit Sircar spoke to Subhash K Jha about the making of this film
Pink could not have been an easy film to make. What was the most difficult aspect of its genesis?
The most difficult part for me and my writer Ritesh Shah was the second half of the narration, the court room interrogation. We did a lot of research. I would sometimes become lawyer and Ritesh victim or vice versa. And we asked any questions that came in our mind. Sometimes the actors did participate in the process. Taapsee Pannu came with her own anecdotes from her college days. So all our collective experiences came to form the court room drama. Ritesh took all these materials and then he wrote the entire second-half in 3-4 days. Just possibly a week before we entered the courtroom shooting. We were tense as Mr Bachchan was asking for the script and we hadn’t cracked the second half. But these kind of harassment cases were many when we did our research. Placing the film in North India was easy as grew up in Delhi and I have seen these kind of incidents I almost had a firsthand experience when I witnessed something of this sort. Ronnie Lahiri (the producer) my friend came up with this idea of bringing in a North Eastern character, as he grew up in Shillong… and I myself have seen how they treated them in Delhi. That character made the group look so real and authentic.“
Adding, “Even filming with all actors was also a process. Because we were asking some direct questions. In some scenes we didn’t do rehearsals. We went for spontaneous reactions… so sometimes you will see actors are completely surprised by the responses. On the other hand, some sequences were thoroughly rehearsed like a play. Everyday the team would be teary eyed after every scene. Emotionally that was too much to take, what these three girls, Taapsee, Kirti Kulhari and Andrea Tariang were going through. Sometimes we would feel so immersed that I started feeling shameful as we indirectly were part of the this social system.. And I was fortunate enough that Mr Bachchan agreed to do the film just based on the idea that we narrated to him. We had many sessions with him too to crack the character. His character was actually written in parts. I remember when I came up with the idea of “No Means No” he was overwhelmed… and no means no became a slogan.
“Some friends sent pics from Kolkata protest with “No Means No” banner. Pink did affect a lot of people, including us in the team. It is an important conversation that we should carry on till the society finds a course correction. I am really proud of Pink.”
