The world becomes a strange place when you can’t trust anyone any more. Painted with colours of life and shimmering on the ramp of festivity, the high society works really hard to fool everyone. Including themselves. The delusionary flourescent strobe lights, belligerent music, fashionable clothes (or maybe the lack of it), attitude cigarettes that serve more as a finger accessory than the real thing, Acid cool cocktails and the hunk of a bartender who’s more in demand especially amongst the ladies above forty diligently smile towards illuminating the memorable night in front of the flashbulbs of the Paparazzi. Their only goal in life: Please put me on Page 3! And give me my black and white or colour share of paper fame. At least for a day.
Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3 is a brilliantly realistic movie and it is fabulously entertaining too. A rich gujju NRI is in Bombay to start his business networking in the city of dreams. The Public Relations firm that he hires organises a Page 3 party for him where he comes across the who’s who of the glamour and financial capital of India. But more importantly, scores of glamour seeking press reporters, photographers and television crew sweep the party with the impact of a Tsunami wave. Everyone just wants to be swept away by the alluring idea of being featured on Page 3 of prominent newspapers the following day. It took many years for him to get rich but it took only one night for the gujju millionaire to become famous.
Madhvi Sharma (Konkana Sen in a brilliantly understated performance) is a cub reporter who has recently joined a happening newspaper called Nation Today. Since she doesn’t have any experience, her editor (Boman Irani, restraint and relaxed) asks her to do Page 3. She covers all the big parties in the city where she comes across the more or less same set of people. The men discuss business, the politicians refrain from giving their opinions on the government policies, the ladies discuss their extra-marital affairs, talk sweet and then bitch once you are gone, the artistes and the film folks arrive late and depart early, a bunch of youngsters are pencilled in to rock the dance floor, a few confirmed gate crashers also enjoy the gracious smiles and open arms of ’generous’ hosts who are very careful about the moves of the press photographers. Nobody wants to offend anyone. Deliberately.
The lives of these so-called celebrities is filled with hypocrisy. Old women aching-to-be-young, sleep around with boys younger than their own sons, filthy rich businessman offers sexual favours to his foreign guests by dishing out small orphan kids, an awarded police officer serves as an agent of such businessmen if they ever get caught, clean-image film stars and women empowerment espousing film directors expect unadulterated closeness to wannabe starlets in the tinsel world and a few people who are genuinely good from the same brigade are treated shabbily even if it is their own funeral.
Madhvi shares her room with Pearl, (Sandhya Mridul in a award winning role) an airhostess and they are later joined by Gayatri (Tara Sharma, so so performance), a struggling film actress. She also has a gay film make-up artiste who lets her down. And so does her own boyfriend, a model, hungry for success. At any cost. By doing anything. Vinayak (Atul Kulkarni, competent in small role) is the crime reporter for Nation Today and Madhvi learns a lot about ’real’ journalism from him. He also teaches her the decisive lesson of practicality in a dog-eats-dog world. The party goes on....
As I watched this film I recollected my two years in the field of active journalism. I covered all sorts of stories like theatre, sports, music, films, advertising and literature. The five star hotels seem so imposing from outside but once you are meant to do a job, the whole thing may become very synthetic. Page 3 as a film succeeds at many levels but I wish they would have highlighted the corruption within the world of journalism. All sorts of corrupts practices are employed by a certain section of press people. They may be a few photographers, support staff within big organisations like The Times of India, who don’t have anything to do with writing or making pages on Quark Express. This group of support staff coaxes big names to give an extra star to movies in lieu of money. Everyone knows who is doing what but they can’t do anything as the life of journalists can be really stifling at times. The politics in a newsroom can be an intense drama better left untold as many won’t even believe that it could be true.
Without going into details about my personal experiences, I would like to commend Madhur Bhandarkar for making a very interesting film. And more importantly telling it interestingly as well. The technique of ’’Montages’’ where small sequences are shown to describe the whole event was brilliantly used. Music is another highlight. Shamir Tandon has done a good job. The fact that the songs are part of the background score gives the ambience a wonderful effect. After listening to Lata Mangeshkar sing Kitne ajeeb rishte hain yahan pe.... I would like to take back my comment from Raghav2K’s Veer Zara article where I had agreed that Lata should retire graciously. But after the Page 3 number I must say, she still is rock solid but ought to concentrate more on songs in lower or medium scale as that suits her pitching perfectly.
Page 3, Don’t flip it!