It’s been 20 years if you can believe it, since Madhur Bhandarkar’s masterpiece, Page 3, was released. We take a look back at the film, which starred Konkona Sen Sharma, Atul Kulkarni, and Boman Irani.
Welcome to the beau monde, where everything is for sale, especially the conscience…where the rich and famous blow kisses in the air. As the humid room records their passionate pretenses, the emptiness of their ecstasy is exposed in recriminating rings of ricocheting realism.
The slimy NRI social climber is informed that a well-known socialite has committed suicide,
“Get me my fashion designer!”, he screams hysterically.
The funeral sequence that follows with all the deceased woman’s contacts and acquaintances shedding sobs into TV cameras is savagely funny and cruel, bitter and tragic.
Often, in the course of this mordant view of decadent elitism, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or just feel sorry for people who abuse little children for pleasure.
And Lata Mangeshkar’s pain-lashed voice comes on the exceptionally evocative soundtrack singing Kitne ajeeb rishtey hain yahan par….
It’s that rare time in a cineaste’s life when he needs to sit up and shake himself awake from the semi-slumber of watching the same old formulas wrapped up in shiny cellophane.
Madhur Bhandakar—God bless his troubled conscience!—peels off the layers of subterfuge and artifice that have become a huge part of our lives, both in and out of the movie theatres, to expose the festering wounds of a world that whips itself into shapes of sickening self-gratification.
These are people whom you’re bound to run into in your next party at the most happening place in Mumbai. The noise, the smoke, the blaring music, the boasting and bitching… yup, Bhandarkar knows this world like the back of his hand. He cannibalizes characters who colonize these catty congregations to put together a story that grips you by your guts and refuses to let go.
This isn’t the first film to mourn the death of the conscience in a competitive world. What makes Page 3 so deliciously decisive and many pegs above other films and plays ripping away the satiny sheets of hypocrisy in the beau monde is the skilled words and visuals that contextualize saturated people while remaining detached from their depraved and subverted definitions of a full and happy life.
Bhandarkar fills the screen with a conflicting collage of smug, thrill-seeking characters. They’re either wannabes or have-been-there-done-it-all types. The world of ambition and disappointment, agony and ecstasy comes together in a stunning clasp of resplendent exploration of a decadent lifestyle.
It’s easy to attribute the film’s inner strength to the hugely gifted ensemble cast and to the emotionally equipped soundtrack. But above all of these, Page 3 tells a truly riveting story conveying cyclonic changes in the graph of morality as the characters move from one state of yearning to another, kicking off their high heels to plunge into the low life.
Bhandarkar, who made the unforgettable Chandni Bar, has been doddering on the brink with his two misfires Satta and Aan: Men At Work. By depicting the redemptive journey of one journalist Madhavi (Konkona Sen Sharma) who goes from phony page-3 reporting to straight-from-the –morgue crime reportage, Bhandarkar redeems his own compromised creativity.
Whereas Chandni Bar was, to a large extent, redeemed by Tabu’s plot-defining performance, the acting talent in Page 3 is scattered uniformly to subsume a wealth of walloping emotions. From the boastful driver bragging about his mater’s exploits to the drivers outside the party to the party animals ranging from the social climber to the nymphomaniac, to the cocaine-snorting children of the rich and the blasphemous…the film takes a tightly telescopic view.
The editing (Suresh Pai) and the cinematography (Madhu Rao) harmonize the film’s superbly filled view of existential emptiness by focusing on the entire personality of the characters rather than just their overt gestures. The actors are almost uniformly first-rate, with Boman Irani as the fair-but-finally-scared newspaper editor, Sandhya Mridul as a spunky hairhotess (who marries ‘old’ money), Rehaan Engineer as a gay dress designer, Bikram Saluja as a picture-perfect superstar who uses people without meaning to offend them, and the Bhandarkar regular Atul Kulkarni as the conscientious crime reporter, taking the lead and leading the takes to heights of expressionism.
A special word for Konkona Sen Sharma. How does she manage to pick projects with a relatively longer shelf life? Page 3 is a glorious Hindi beginning for this eminently mouldable actress. She uses her personal emotional and physical sensitivities to make her journalist’s character crisply credible.
Seldom in recent years has an ensemble cast made such articulate space for itself in the narrative. The biting dialogues and the simmering sarcasm of people on the edge spices up Bhandarkar’s emphatic narrative without putting too fine a point to the message about the hypocrisy of the hollow people.
The characters are never condemned but depicted savagely nonetheless as casualties of the glamorous world that they think they possess and rule. It’s that sense of phony splendor that emerges from the narrative to hit us straight in the solar plexus. Bhandarkar had made the same impact earlier with Chandni Bar. Here, he seems to be much more in control of his craft and the commodious collection of characters who often move in and out of camera range without slipping away from our attention.
You really can’t ignore these fatally flawed people… or the return of Madhur Bhandarkar. Page 3 is a fine, hard-hitting, and often jolting film with a climactic corkscrew twist that would shock only those who think the world of illusions, also known as showbiz, is exempted from the harsh reality of disintegrating values and a complete erosion of self-questioning morality.
