Ooh, la, la … national integration

I don’t know about you, but when I came out of the movie hall after The Dirty Picture, I felt a changed man. I was not ashamed that I saw the movie alone, not in a corner seat, of course.

But when I went in I took all the precautions that one usually takes while going to see a dirty picture and this one was The Dirty Picture! I had a trench coat on, the hat was drawn low over my eye brows, my shifty eyes scanned the horizon for any familiar faces and so on, though all under a bright November sun shine.

I am not offering a review of the movie, besides saying that it was a through and through Vidya Balan’s movie. No space for any other name on the billboard. So completely she dominated the movie. But, I do have a few comments to make.

The movie was accepted even by the classes because, and only because it was ostensibly based on a real life. What I mean is, had the movie not been promoted as some life actually lived (half-lived or whatever), the reaction, I am sure, would have been unrelentingly hostile. Was Naseeruddin Shah roped in merely to confer more legitimacy on the movie? If yes, that move failed miserably because even as good as he was, his efforts were thoroughly overshadowed.

The movie would have been tagged porno (this is what I was afraid of and hence my elaborate dress-up and evasive actions as I entered the movie hall) were it not for Silk Smitha and the escape clause that came with her story. That is, to make the classes accept something, it has to be at least half-way real. Why can’t art, of whatever kind, go beyond the bounds of the moral universe the classes have cocooned themselves in, at least in the public space? Most fictions are that, fiction, are they not? The classes do not shun them, do they?

Whence this prudery? And, why this moral uppity when it comes to movies like The Dirty Picture that it will be accepted only if it purportedly portrays a real situation. Why is it that without a real life Silk Smitha, we could not have had a The Dirty Picture, and enjoyed the acting talents of Vidya Balan, that was acceptable to the classes? Beats me.

My second comment on the movie concerns the social set up as depicted in the movie. Silk Smitha was an exclusive Southern phenomenon. During her rise and subsequent fall, as I found out later, I was away in the US and was not even aware of her mass appeal. When I came back I have seen clippings of some song sequences of hers (in respectable TV channels, I must hasten to add). She was dark complexioned, and I can bet she would have abraded the sensibilities of much of the audience in North India. They, coming in for titillation, would have found her severely off-putting.

But in the movie Vidya was not dark except in her pre-Silk, not-yet-glamorized days. The street scenes were obviously from Tamil Nadu (even had they been shot elsewhere in a studio), street food, people wearing dhotis the South Indian way, the ladies lined up at the water tap with colorful plastic Kodams and so on. The word Amma (Do you remember the days when film glossies used this word with clenched noses to describe the matronly chaperons on the film sets, particularly of Southern stars?) so pervades the movie to ensure the cultural geography is never misunderstood. And, every one speaks Hindi and not a single eyebrow was raised.

These days there are quite a few Telugu movies that are shown on some Hindi channels (dubbed) and these must grate on one’s nerves – the astounding level of failure of lip synched dialogues. On top of that, the cultural background is totally divorced from the linguistic milieu. Yet The Dirty Picture has transcended that divide, as far as I could see.

This is something I absolutely liked. The way the director located the story yet let it stay in the background. What he says is something like, “It really does not matter where in India the story happened. It just happened in India and that is it. I am telling it in the language I want to.”

We talk a lot about the globalizing India. I think this movie is one of the first to have shown what a nationalizing India is. Just a small observation.

This is the reason that when I came out of the movie hall, I had taken off my trench coat and lifted the hat at least halfway up my forehead.

Raghuram Ekambaram

P.S. By the way, I have heard that Silk Smitha started out rather as Silukku Smitha, which In Coimbatore Tamil means more like flirtatious, vanity-driven etc. Later on the ‘oo’ sound in Smitha’s name was stylized to Silk to mean silky smooth, I suppose.

The addition of a vowel at the end of a word (which is almost universal in Telugu, with ‘oo’ sound dominating) is the reason the current rage Kolaveri di has black-u, white-u etc.