It feels great to be back on MS after such a long, long(more than eight months) time. Having hardly received any response for my previous views(please note that I still call them views and not reviews) on "Lunchbox" and "Mary Kom", I was not sure if I would ever review a movie here. However, something changed after I watched "Piku". I desperately needed a platform to write something about the movie, and I chose to write it all here.
It’s been more than a fortnight that the flick got released, and I have nothing to say about the story as almost everyone(at least here on MS) would have seen the movie or at the least read reviews by others or figured out what the story of the movie is all about through Wikipedia and a number of other sources. Therefore, I have decided to share my experience of watching this movie rather than writing about the plot of the movie.
Despite the movie dealing with a septuagenarian having constipation issues, I felt something great about it right from frame one. As a passionate traveler, I could relate to a number of instances in the movie so beautifully brought out. I like how Shoojit brings the best of the ordinariness in a family’s travel to a certain place so engrossingly well on to the screen. Consider for example the excitement of Piku(played by Deepika) when she clicks a snap of a landscape on her cell phone when she is traveling to Kolkata in a car or how one gets to see trains going to various places while you’re traveling in a car on a road. It’s these simple things that are so accurately captured that springs the movie to life.
I like the subjects Shoojit Sarcar chooses to pick for his movies. Dealing with sperm donation and the effect it has on relationships in the future in Vicky Donor to handling a sensitive issue of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in Madras Cafe, the director does a great job at bringing out a father–daughter relationship in a setting where an eccentric father has issues in his bowels, while a daughter loves and cares for her father adorably in spite of his constant quirks. Given that the plot deals with a 70-year-old, hypochondriac Bhashkor(Played by Big B) with constipation issues, the movie could have been grossly shot or messed up had it not been for the way it is dealt with.
Amitabh Bachchan was a star and shall remain a star for all his life. It at least seems so at the way he is going about his career even at this age. There are actors who come and go everyday, while Mr. Bachchan still surprises us with his acting genius. Irrfan is another acting genius like no other in our country today. In one of the scenes, Piku finds a knife in Rana’s(played by Mr. Khan) car and goes on to show it to him, and I love how Rana reacts. How much I wished the director had told Irrfan to remove his sunglasses so that the audiences could have seen his accurate expression in his eyes! Every frame that captures both AB and Mr. Khan is a sight to behold. Deepika shouts, cribs, smiles, and talks, and she does everything that her character asks her to do like a gal next door. There isn’t a scene in the movie where I felt she was what the character she played couldn’t have been. All the other actors do play their roles justifiably well.
I don’t know much about Kolkata, but given that the director is from that part of the world, I loved how it was so marvelously captured. Having traveled to Varanasi, I loved how the town was so beautifully shot both during the day and the night. It brought back my traveling memories associated to that place. I thought there were too many scenes and way too many frames that could have been easily classified as really good; however, my favorite scene or the part of the movie was when Bhaskor dies, Piku says, reflecting on her father’s character and his eccentricities, that he made even death listen to him.
This is a movie you can’t miss—for the performances, for the cinematography, for the background score, for the sheer simplicity with which this film is made, and for the greatness that it has turned out to be.