REVIEW: Pankh

KISS OF THE WONDER-WOMAN

So much of Sudipto Chattopadhyay’s maiden venture is a cacophonous mess that it is difficult to wade through any of it and salvage even a sliver of excitement from the overwrought proceedings on-screen. Clearly every minute of it has been written to provoke and jolt its audience from its presumed complacence, even if it’s done with awry camera angles that ‘swim’ along and the liberal use of cuss-words that ring out more like non-sequiturs than anything cogent and achieve little more than having the bleep censor on overdrive; or with characters that leap out of the screen trying ever-so hard to create larger-than-life archetypes and failing spectacularly.

As the pushy mother living vicariously through her son Jerry, once a child star made to perform female parts, it’s harrowing to watch the otherwise well-regarded Lillete Dubey (as Mary) attempt to play out her stock character in such hysterical fashion that it is hard not to be reminded of the time Kirron Kher hammed it up royally in Kalpana Lajmi’s Darmiyaan. Like in that film, when a distraught Ms Kher holds the stricken frame of her defiled hermaphrodite son in her arms, here the Pieta is invoked a whit more explicitly, first etched out in thick dark lines on the walls of the family home, and then when Mary, after a night of alcohol-fueled dueling between mother and child, rushes out to embrace her emasculated son as he floats adrift in a flash-flood of tears and blood, a bewildering turn of events that could only have been conjured up in a moment of hyper-imaginative dementia. There’s more Catholic imagery elsewhere, as when Jerry, in one of his frequent hallucinations, carries a crucifix as he drags himself across a cemetery bearing the cross as it were. It would appear that the actor Maradona Rebello has been set up for even more rigorous punishment.

It isn’t as if the film’s central premise is in any way topical or worthy. There are no real antecedents for this kind of thing. The oft-repeated example is that of the child actor Ashish Chanana, who I’m sure would be messed up more by watching Pankh than by the real-life subterfuge his mother had put him through. After all, child actors like Sarika and the Irani sisters have played boys for eons without it meaning that the gender reversal resulted in them being any worse for wear later in life. It’s always presumed that masculinity is more easily challenged and here it appears that one person has delved into his own well of self-loathing and despair and come up with this tangled web of notions involving gender and sexuality in which he insistently embroils his leading man.

Jerry seems to occupy a kind of twilight zone in which he can flirt with being a young adolescent man with flesh-and-blood desires as well as have a back-story that makes him a more ethereal being. Bipasha Basu, in her frequent visitations to his dreams, ostensibly embodies both his fantasy woman Nandini and his own innate feminine self. Politics aside, Jerry could have been an antidote to the kind of gender stereotyping or gay panic that abounds in contemporary circles. In a pivotal scene, and one of the few sequences allowed some levity, he auditions for a film by performing both the male and female parts. Nandini, as the imaginary muse, stands in for him occasionally in a long drawn-out sequence that actually allows both actors to finally display some histrionic mettle.

However, the tragedy of Jerry is that he has been marked out as a defective piece and therefore he is doomed, never allowed to build upon his natural empathy as when he takes an aspiring starlet under his wing. Instead he’s always diffident about his own burgeoning masculinity and subject to vicious taunts even in his own head. The muse, in her wonder woman get-ups, calls him variously a half-man, a woman, a hijra. To her credit, Ms Basu does supply this film with its only understated turn, but that could also be a testament to her usual limited range. The treatment of a sub-plot involving the starlet and her mother (played by old-timer Asha Sachdev) negotiating the proverbial casting couch is so voyeuristic that you realize that the film never did have a chance of being a more penetrating human document.

Mr Rebello, otherwise a personable young man, only fleetingly displays a semblance of the star quality that his character is supposed to possess a profusion of. This is a role of great complexity, however convoluted, and it isn’t immediately clear if the actor doesn’t pass muster. He whines and shrieks and appears out of his depth, but on occasion, he is reined in and draws us into the interior world of his character, almost but not quite evoking Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty. There are other celebrated young actors of our times who have fared much worse in their debut films. However, Pankh is one grisly tale, and so overdone, that you shudder to think of the careers it may have ruined in its wake.

Comments

[Bidisha]

Funny. Agree with every line.

[Vivek]

I thought pankh had great visual value and interesting imagery but does that make a good film ???? Pankh is a complete disaster when it comes to content,Bipasha,Maradona,Mahesh,Daya and over over over the top Lillette !!

[Vikram Phukan]

I think much of Pankh is like this hallucination in Jerry's head - he always seems to be tripping on something or the other. Could have been a really surreal experience if the director had not allowed everyone to go ballistic...