Rarely comes a movie with a starcast, story and narration that draw you out of your zone of mind chatter and then makes a point or two in 125 minutes flat without any formulaic elements of story-telling or even statutory warnings. "Piku" has raised great expectations when Shoojit Sircar, the director of "Vicky Donor" and "Madras Cafe" cast Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and Irrfan Khan in an improbable combination. Surprise, he delivers with style and aesthetics. And engages you till the end with a screenplay that packs a million emotions, it has a storyline that resonates with most people.
Piku is Deepika Padukone who stays with her seventy-year old father Bhaskar Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan). Piku is single and a key partner in an architecture firm who never takes a break even as she dates many men in the hope of marrying one day. Amitabh is a hypochondriac old man whose sole problem in life is constipation. He also worries about all the parameters that make old men make weekly trips to diagnostic centers - BP, Sugar, blood count and so on. Deepika and Amitabh argue about health issues and about that over-anxiety about smoothness in bowel movements that eludes Amitabh till the very end. Piku has an obsession over her father's health habits, her father has a neurotic thing or two about his health and constipation. Both get worked up and miss out on the real fun in life - it takes a toll on Piku's work habits. She calls a regular taxi service to ferry her on work trips but almost always drives the car drivers to bump up.. Enter the owner of the fleet of cars - Irrfan. With the main characters built out like this, an idea comes to both father and daughter to head out for a holiday in homeland Kolkata by road. Irrfan is forced to drive the vehicle because none of the drivers turn up.
For the next 1500 kilometers of road trip, Irrfan becomes a curious bystander to the intriguing fights, ego-trips, patch-ups and face-offs between the three of them. Irrfan is a stranger to the family yet he becomes an intruder who negotiates emotions and drives home a perspective or two on what is bugging the twosome. At times, Irrfan also throws tantrums or tramples upon the ego of Amitabh or holds a mirror to Deepika on the way she has been dealing with her father all these years. Most of the times, the exchange of words between Irrfan and Amitabh is fiery but what Amitabh realises is that Irrfan is dry-cleaning his funeral clothes and making him see ways of getting out of a lot of self-created mess - mostly in the mind. Shoojit Sircar gives us an unhurried and dispassionate overview of the emotions of millions of Indians as we deal with health issues of aging parents and clueless youth who have their head in the sand on matters of balancing affections with personal goals. Will Amitabh solve his health issues thanks to Irrfan? Does Deepika find a man finally? What is Irrfan's role in both of their lives? Is there a twist in climax? (Hint: There is...) "Piku" takes you on an exhilarating ride of emotions and treatment like never seen before. It is difficult to give a three-act structure to a story that moves out of your living room and back but Sircar pulls it off with memorable story-telling.
What makes the film stand out is not just the brilliance of all the technical masters - in photography and in music by Anupam Roy but in the aspects of direction and narration and finer subtleties and sensibilities of Bengali households. If you have been closer to a Bengali, you will realise the DNA in their social intercourse - everybody loves good food and roots for their culture but they also have intellectual candour and the abrasiveness of behavior towards each other. Daughter corrects the GK of father, sister-in-law gives it back to her sister's husband, a family tenant talks turkey with her avuncular "owner". In such a "Didi-style" war of words, one wonders why Bengalis rarely inter-marry, keep fighting with each other but bond better overall than many other regions. Sircar captures the essence of an ordinary story and constructs a mesmerising mosaic of human emotions - there are dollops of humor that bring the roof down in almost every scene with every character - sometimes insinuative and mostly explicit about the motions of the human digestion. For this film, Shoojit farts all his way with the ultimate compilation of jokes and trivia about constipation and all that - that regales us despite being predictable. Messages that come out of the film are purely accidental, not intentional so Sircar ensures the movie is never preachy and boring. That shot of Deepika Padukone playing Shuttle Badminton is a paisa-vasool scene.
Performances by all the three stand out - Amitabh, you don't see him, you only see a Bengali babu who is finicky about his health and self-righteous about everything else. This film is the finest for AB in years - better than the flippant experiments of recent years - people will enshrine AB for this role forever for he has truly imbibed the core of a Bengali patriarch. Deepika gives an impressive performance that dovetails her hiterto unexplored dimensions of acting into a complex role. Hiding her emotions, guarding her vulnerability, and hardlining a tough father while letting go when needed - whoa, what a role! Irrfan essays another effortless role as an owner who is at more than one receiving end. He has mastered the art of input-output ratio for an actor - just knows what dosage to give for each scene and yet leave the audience gasping for what is not expressed. His school of acting is quite different from the montony of a Naseerudin Shah or an Anupam Kher. It spawned the likes of Nawazuddinn Siddiqi but Irrfan is a malleable actor who stumps you with new tricks each time. A surprise packet has been Moushimi Chatterjee - so full of energy and live-wire Bengali goodness and outspoken-ness. She makes her entry in both the halves with good impact. Raghubeer Yadav as the doctor is also good. Musical output by Roy takes the cinematic experience to new highs. Also the role by the cinematographer - he shows great visuals of the Ganges and the multi-faceted personality of Kolkata but you still cannot miss the sponsor names like Amul milk more than once. But how did he shoot those moving pictures of a car in motion? Haven't seen that in many films and considering the lengthy footage of the travel, it looked authentic - the visuals of the roads.
Sircar's strength seems to turn an ordinary story into a fireball that keeps snowballing until you get the main points, in crisp format. No pretensions, no flashbacks, no mundane stuff but taut editing. No wonder, he is done with in 125 minutes. If only the jokes were not just about the stools all the time, this could have been a five-star movie but who cares? This is one of the cleanest movies in recent times and deserves a universal view (Can't understand why a U/A rating was given). If you have parents or not, this film is sure to move you. Most watchable and entertaining.
Rating: 4.5/5
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