The Dirty Picture Review
Critic’s Rating: ****
Cast: Vidya Balan, Naseeruddin Shah, Emraan Hashmi, Tusshar Kapoor
Direction: Milan Luthria
Genre: Drama
Duration: 2 hours 20 minutes
Story: Reshma ( Vidya Balan), a small town girl with dreams of stardom in her eyes, sets out for Chennai, with nothing but her passion to stir her on. After the usual period of struggle and rejections, she gets her break as an item girl who’s got the most sensuous moves in town. It doesn’t take her long to storm the box office as Silk, the sex symbol who’s driving a whole generation crazy with her oomph. The industry too can’t stay immune to her earthy charms and her list of worshipers — and lovers — keeps multiplying, until it’s downhill time. Will simpleton Silk be able to survive the rigours of a heartless work place that discards faster than it accepts?
Review: All she had was her well endowed body, her in-your-face sexuality, her seductive moves and her rock hard confidence to carry her through a world that was more than willing to exploit a lone woman, seeking sustenance in a man’s world. That was enough to transform Reshma into Silk, a storm that refused to be quelled by anything or anybody. Determined to take on the industry single-handedly and carve a niche for herself as a sex symbol in a hypocritical world, Silk was the steroid shot that sent the world in a tizzy. Journalists and holier-than-thou art film makers like Abraham (Emraan Hashmi), hysterical women’s groups and the ubiquitous moral police branded her the scum of the earth. But her legion fans were ready to lay their lives for her and the industry heroes, like Suryakant ( Naseeruddin Shah) couldn’t keep their eyes and hands off her. One dirty picture followed another and name, fame and success peaked to unimaginable heights for our girl from nowhere who unabashedly lived out her dreams. Her survival policy: savour the bouquets, ignore the brickbats. Life was literally on song.
So where did the problem lie? It lay in the duplicity of a world which was hungering for sex, but was ashamed to acknowledge this primordial need. So that, serenading Silk was okay in the darkness of the auditorium or behind closed bedroom doors. But accepting her as part of the social pecking order was taboo, for Silk, in a sick society, was a synonym for dirt. Did Silk care? Of course, she did, although she gave the impression she gave a damn to the moral custodians and the double standards of society. But reality began to pinch — and really hurt — when her mother shut the door on her face, journalists, hungry for her interview otherwise, refused to entertain her in their page 3 parties and her lover (Naseeruddin Shah), who a minute ago was showering her with compliments, shunted her to the bathroom when his wife unexpectedly arrived. She tried to hide her pain through binge drinking and by changing her lovers ( Tusshar Kapoor), but the sense of rejection just refused to go away.
Partially responsible for her angst too was the arrogance that stars acquire with the onrush of success. One by one, she began to lose her friends in the industry and work stopped coming her way due to her cocky attitude. Didn’t take long for the superstar to hit the road to destruction and end up as a sorry picture of failure and ruin. In this decrepit state — the fate of most erstwhile Bollywood heroines — her only friend was the man who hated her the most, Emraan Hashmi. But was it already too late to resuscitate a broken soul….
The Dirty Picture is essentially Vidya Balan’s film, all the way. She gives a towering performance as the protagonist who remains unapologetic about her life till the very end. The high point of her act is the fact that despite portraying a sex bomb, her sexuality never ever gets vulgar and crude. Instead, there is an endearing quality to her attempts to shock and awe a staid society that thrives on the fake. Her tour de force act however doesn’t throw the male leads into the shadows. They manage to hold their own in full measure, despite the relative meagerness of their roles. Also, it is the naughty dialogues (Rajat Arora) of the film which add immense flavour to the proceedings. It’s a no-holds-barred screenplay which rightly refuses to treat sex as a four letter word. Kudos to Milan Luthria for handling such a controversial theme with such sensitivity and boldness.
The Dirty Picture is definitely not only your film for the week, but is a seminal work that will be studied in feminist discourses.
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