As the fat and fading film star, desperate for a role, she is almost bursting out of her skimpy blouse as she sits talking to a film director, ugly rolls of stomach hanging over the waistband of her circulation-stifling mini-skirt. He taunts her that he can still treat her to a cup of coffee. “Do Silk coffee lana,” she calls out to the waiter and tips the ash off her cigarette with: “Yahan mere naam ki coffee milti hai”.
In doing that she gives a fascinating dignity to sleaze. I know that’s a paradox. But so seamlessly does film actor Vidya Balan merge with Silk, the sex symbol of the eighties whose life ended in tragedy, that the two become one. In a strangely symbiotic cinematic relationship, Balan gets to do the role of a
lifetime, while Silk acquires a dignity that could never be hers in life.
What you must watch The Dirty Picture (agreed, ridiculous name) for is the exquisite hold over the craft that lets an actor get under the skin of a role, and fling it at us - warts and zits oozing in our faces. Balan plays Silk with so much conviction that you can only gasp at her fearlessness. She lets absolutely nothing stand between her and the voyeuristic audience. Eventually, you want to look away. But the camera doesn’t let you. It shows you the strain under her eyes, the cracking makeup, the sagging skin, the film star cracking under loneliness and alcoholism, desperate to hold on to something that is long gone.
But that comes later in the film. The OMG moments start with Silk’s audacious on-the-knees seduction of aging superstar Surya (Naseeruddin Shah lying lewdly sprawled on a couch) for a role. She gets the men in the front rows whistling with her raunchy or revolting (depending on whether you are male or male-with-double-standards) tongue moves over black lipsticked lips. She gyrates on the grass with an egg poaching on the belly button. Whether she is shifting attention away from her tacky house by giving an interview from the bathtub; or she’s letting Surya’s baby put a hand on her breast and then looking into his wife’s eyes with: baap pe gaya hai; Vidya makes no excuses for her character. She plays Silk the way she sees her: as a no holds barred ambitious girl who rises above poverty and hunger by using what she has to get where she wants to in a male dominated industry. She thinks she has won, only to learn that the world still belongs to men.
Catch her hungry and uncouth, undiscovered yet - eating rice with her fingers at a cheap roadside joint. In a cheap cotton sari, without makeup, in the darkness of a cinema hall, delightedly picking up coins flung as lusty male response to her first onscreen song. Breaking down as she watches (from the keyhole) a guilty Surya making dutiful love to his wife, after rudely pushing her into the bathroom when they are almost caught together. Watch her drunkenly applying red nailpaint with shakey hands as she dresses up one last time and then takes an overdose of sleeping pills, lonely and forgotten by the same men who lusted after her.
Despite the tacky script, the insipid direction, the nonsensical storyline, the film deserves a watch. For Naseeruddin Shah’s Surya, a completely over the top film star with no talent but a craving for female flesh and dialogues like, “Jawaani toh chakhne ke liye hoti hai.” And for Vidya Balan’s magic of
conviction. We finally have an actor who has dared to go where no Bollywood brave has gone before. I know this sounds feministic, but feels good that she's a woman.
For Bhappi Lahiri's rediscovered genius and Naseer's Surya moves:
In doing that she gives a fascinating dignity to sleaze. I know that’s a paradox. But so seamlessly does film actor Vidya Balan merge with Silk, the sex symbol of the eighties whose life ended in tragedy, that the two become one. In a strangely symbiotic cinematic relationship, Balan gets to do the role of a
lifetime, while Silk acquires a dignity that could never be hers in life.
What you must watch The Dirty Picture (agreed, ridiculous name) for is the exquisite hold over the craft that lets an actor get under the skin of a role, and fling it at us - warts and zits oozing in our faces. Balan plays Silk with so much conviction that you can only gasp at her fearlessness. She lets absolutely nothing stand between her and the voyeuristic audience. Eventually, you want to look away. But the camera doesn’t let you. It shows you the strain under her eyes, the cracking makeup, the sagging skin, the film star cracking under loneliness and alcoholism, desperate to hold on to something that is long gone.
But that comes later in the film. The OMG moments start with Silk’s audacious on-the-knees seduction of aging superstar Surya (Naseeruddin Shah lying lewdly sprawled on a couch) for a role. She gets the men in the front rows whistling with her raunchy or revolting (depending on whether you are male or male-with-double-standards) tongue moves over black lipsticked lips. She gyrates on the grass with an egg poaching on the belly button. Whether she is shifting attention away from her tacky house by giving an interview from the bathtub; or she’s letting Surya’s baby put a hand on her breast and then looking into his wife’s eyes with: baap pe gaya hai; Vidya makes no excuses for her character. She plays Silk the way she sees her: as a no holds barred ambitious girl who rises above poverty and hunger by using what she has to get where she wants to in a male dominated industry. She thinks she has won, only to learn that the world still belongs to men.
Catch her hungry and uncouth, undiscovered yet - eating rice with her fingers at a cheap roadside joint. In a cheap cotton sari, without makeup, in the darkness of a cinema hall, delightedly picking up coins flung as lusty male response to her first onscreen song. Breaking down as she watches (from the keyhole) a guilty Surya making dutiful love to his wife, after rudely pushing her into the bathroom when they are almost caught together. Watch her drunkenly applying red nailpaint with shakey hands as she dresses up one last time and then takes an overdose of sleeping pills, lonely and forgotten by the same men who lusted after her.
Despite the tacky script, the insipid direction, the nonsensical storyline, the film deserves a watch. For Naseeruddin Shah’s Surya, a completely over the top film star with no talent but a craving for female flesh and dialogues like, “Jawaani toh chakhne ke liye hoti hai.” And for Vidya Balan’s magic of
conviction. We finally have an actor who has dared to go where no Bollywood brave has gone before. I know this sounds feministic, but feels good that she's a woman.
For Bhappi Lahiri's rediscovered genius and Naseer's Surya moves:
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