Forgive Bipasha & Mallika, Vidya Has Arrived

Watched Vidya Balan’s ‘The Dirty Picture‘ on Saturday. Why did I watch it? I like, nay, liked Vidya Balan and I thought that, though the clips were appalling, since Vidya had agreed to the role, there must be something in the movie – a powerful story, some point…

After a few minutes, I saw, that there was nothing in the movie.
It moves from one bare all costume to the next and one vulgar scene to the next.

There is much ambiguity in the portrayal of Vidya’s character. Its ridiculous in fact.
She is shown telling producers and directors she can do ‘anything’ to get a chance in the movie, she is a dance girl doing dirty moves, she sleeps first with Surya and then with his younger brother Ramakanth but when the papers and magazines write about her and call her Draupadi, she becomes all offended and emotional and burns those magazines as if she were sensitive to such matters.

The film claims it is based on Silk Smitha’s life roughly, and on dance girls in general and on how they were rendered jobless when mainstream heroines who had once been concerned about their image, became ready to do what the ill-famed dance girls had been doing.
But this point is not brought out in the movie. There is just one dialogue ‘Jo Silk karti thi, who hum heroine se karvayenge’ – the lead actor says, ‘What Silk can do, we will get done by the heroine’. Except for this one dialogue the movie does not bring out the point, when it shows her decline. Her decline seems more because of her personal rife with the men who had helped her get a break in the beginning.

Since the movie was about the life of the dance girl and therefore her side of the story, it was only expected that the movie would present the human aspect of the woman, the person behind a mere sex object, the side which the public never got to see, the feeling/thoughts that were personal to her, the internal workings of her mind, her struggle etc., getting the viewer to sympathize with her.
But the movie fails here. Like I said, it moves from one bare all costume to another, one vulgar scene to another and presents merely the ‘dance girl’ in all her nakedness, not bothering at all to show the person behind the dance girl.

But it gets confused now and then and attempts to evoke sympathy from the viewer – there is a scene where she receives an award and lashes out at the audience for eagerly watching her movies and then calling her dirty - in a speech that has all the appearance of a fierce passionate speech but turns out in the end to be without any substantial point and quite misplaced. It evokes no sympathy for her from the audience and leaves you asking why a woman who had run away from her mother and chosen the life she had led, of her own will, should make such a speech.

In the end, in her suicidal note, she asks questions such as ‘why everyman put his arm around her hip but no one on her forehead’ and such… which sound irritating again, coming as they do from a woman who chased men and seduced them recklessly.

These sudden attempts to evoke sympathy for her fail as there is no corresponding portrayal of the human aspect of her character in the movie.

There is no story. One scene after the other shows her almost naked, or seducing someone, or shooting hot scenes and nothing else…
What was there to Silk Smitha‘s life even that called for making a movie on her life? Nothing at all.

VULGAR FAT. Agree that Silk Smitha was fleshy and no way slim, but the movie overemphasizes the fatness. A few scenes showing her in costumes revealing the stomuch were enough to tell us that this was a fat actress. There was no need to rub it in. With those fat thighs and Dunlop tires around the vast expanse of her stomach, sitting sloppily on her couch, she looks disgusting and most vulgar.

Her outfit in every scene is designed to reveal whatever there is to reveal in her. It was Bipasha who had started a very wrong trend in Bollywood and Mallika Sherawat had taken it further. But this girl, Vidya, has taken Bollywood to its depths of depravity. She has beaten all heroines and cabaret dancers that have ever set foot in Hindi films. She could not have fallen below this. One can at last forgive Bipasha as well as Mallika.

What the television clips show are a lot better than some of the actual scenes in the movie.

Why did she agree to do a movie like this? The sum of money offered to her must have been HUGE and it must have been difficult for her to refuse it.

So what’s the next step in her progression towards boldness?
Will she work in blue films?
Why not? After all ‘Sex in an integral part of our lives’, ‘Times have changed’, ‘Indian cinema viewers have matured’ and all…
And when she has already come this far, just a few more inches will not hurt her. Pornography is just a few inches away.

The movie is almost a porn movie.
And Vidya is fit to be a porn star.
After the initial promise of being different from other women in the industry, she has proved that she is indeed one among them, in fact, worse than them, lacking any self respect and here for money.