REVIEW: The Dirty Picture

IT'S DIRTY ALRIGHT

Would Hollywood make a film about say Marilyn Monroe (coincidentally, My Week With Marilyn released in the US and UK just last week), call the protagonist Marilyn, use her blonde bombshell image to sell the film, release it on her birthday, and then cheekily put a disclaimer describing it a 'work of fiction bearing no resemblance to anyone living or dead'? Of course not. But hey, we don't imitate Hollywood. We're the original vultures who have mass orgies over dead people's bodies. And this one's on Southern star Silk Smitha, the sum of whose life is reduced to raunchy dances (and sorrily lacking the sheer brashness and audacity of Silk's original numbers) sex, booze and sleaze, alternating between objectifying her and struggling to portray her as a real human being with rare spunk.

Southern siren: Vidya Balan in The Dirty Picture

Milan Luthria and writer Rajat Arora pick selectively from Silk's tempestuous life, essentially focussing on her sensuality and glossing over the human drama (twisting and leaving out facts in the process), to finally paint her as a tragic heroine whose vilification by the very society and industry that created her, drives her to loneliness, alcoholism and ultimately, suicide.

Some of these things are true, no doubt. Silk Smitha was the original 'sex siren' of the Southern cinemas starring in a staggering 500 films in over just 10 years and, at one point, charging Rs. 50,000 per song, more than any other leading lady of her time. She was an 'item girl' before the coinage, who later produced flop films featuring herself (one in a triple role) which drove her to bankruptcy and she died under mysterious circumstances—found hanging from a ceiling fan in her Chennai apartment.

What Luthria conveniently leaves out is that she ran away from a childhood marriage and was in a live-in relationship with a man who was apparently calling the shots in her personal and professional life at the time of her death. Neither of these men finds a place in the film. Instead you have three stereotypes—the aging superstar who first preys on her (superbly hammed up by Naseeruddin Shah), his writer brother who claims to love her (a horribly miscast Tusshar Kapoor) and a flop filmmaker called Abraham who loves to hate her (Emraan Hashmi).

The film is narrated by Abraham, for whom Silk turns into a lifelong obsession. She taunts him because she knows why he can't stand her. Just as she sees through the entire male establishment of the film business. She cocks a snook at critics like Nyla (Anju Mahendroo) who use her face to sell magazines but only vilify her in print, and the hypocrisy of a world where her body is worshipped in the darkness of the cinema hall, but she is dismissed as a slut in broad daylight.

A fearless performance—Vidya Balan

In the film's standout scene, Silk dances atop her red Maruti 800 outside Nyla's house attracting media-men and passers-by alike to her audacious antics and bringing traffic to a grinding halt, before planting an emphatic kiss on the lips of her present lover to get back at the man who used and dumped her. Contrast this with her laboured pre-interval speech at an award function where she derides the hypocrisy of the industry and the audience in the vein of turgid Bollywood melodramas. 

Vidya Balan has made a bold career choice by agreeing to essay this part—one doesn't know if she understands the implications of being reduced to a sex object for life on account of this one move. And she's mustered up the courage to play it to the hilt. She isn't coy about embodying a woman whose sexuality was her sole calling card and who had to stop thinking to start living on her own terms. One can't picture any other A-list actress who'd risk playing a B-grade vamp on screen, deliver dialogues laced with innuendo—"Use holi khelne ka shauk hai par uski pichkari mein dum nahin"—and even fake an orgasm, not once but twice. More importantly, she brings alive the pathos of Silk Smitha's life, her loneliness and her quest for love and acceptance even when the screenplay fails her.

In the end, although you are angry with Luthria and Co. for sacrificing allegiance to truth in favour of sensationalism (and let's not even get into authenticity of period and place), Silk's tragedy does come through on account of Vidya's fearless performance which prompts you to overlook her occasional lapses into Convent-educated Bombay diction and cheer for the fact that finally a film led entirely by its heroine is likely to become a big draw at the box-office—sadly, for all the wrong reasons.