I watch movie because the Amitabh Bachchan, i’m big fan of those .An old man stares ferociously at a girl in the park.
The girl - white Apple earbuds in place, out on a jog, sweaty and out of breath as she does her stretches - stares back, unblinking. She looks wary of the stare but not afraid of it.
It is an uncomfortable moment with the starer boring a hole with his eyes and the girl confronting it confidently with her own, and, coming as it does rather early in Pink, I began to wonder about a possible connection, a relationship, an estrangement. It is because the girl appears to know the stare so well.
As the movie rolled on and it became clear there was no connection between the two at the time, I realised the reason she knew the stare is because all girls do.
All girls. Pink, directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, isn’t about heroines or crusaders or activisty girls who know how to generate social media buzz. It is, simply and effectively, a film about girls and the brush with which they are often painted in this country.
Three girls go to a rock concert on the outskirts of Delhi - the de facto badlands in current Hindi cinema - and find themselves in a situation with three boys. We aren’t shown what happened. The film adroitly opens on a black screen with the voices of a pleasant situation in the background - a male voice protests the very idea of a last drink, and so on - before things go awry.
We see the girls run home and the boys run to hospital. One of them has been struck and could lose an eye. The girls are nervous, skittish, fearing for their lives and, tellingly, apologetic about the incident. The fear is real on both sides.
Flatmates housed in a quieter Delhi suburb, the girls close the blinds and conversation between them is highly stilted, till the three declare it time to smile and attempt to tickle themselves into normalcy. But normalcy, as we see, isn’t as easily amused.