The Dirty Picture: Review

THE DIRTY PICTURE—UNVEILING THE DIRT WITHIN

Bhawna Gulati

The Dirty Picture—one of the most talked about movie in the year 2011 is receiving mixed responses apart from one unanimous verdict—Bravo Vidya. The movie depicts the life saga of a woman from a small village in Andhra Pradesh turning into the most sought after body in the south Indian film industry in the 1980s. However, contrary to the mass misconception the movie offers much more beyond the struggle of a ‘coming from nowhere’ south Indian porn star, cleavage showing by Silk (Vidya Balan) and her sad love life. The movie unveils not just the life trajectory of a famous south Indian star, Silk, in the 1980’s but also the hypocrisy of the society we live in. The character of Silk is analogous to the darkest character attributes that surround human beings. Their existence is known but could not be acknowledged.

Silk epitomizes that side of each one of us, which we know to exist but are too embarrassed to recognize or own it up. They are well appreciated as part of our own selves in lightless surroundings but in the bright lights any sort of acquaintance with them frights us of public opprobrium. The movie satirically depicts how each participant in the plot—the director, the actor, the journalist and the audiences—fulfill their desires, monetary and non-monetary, by encashing Silk’s sexuality yet they are capable of segregating the world into good and bad, pure and dirty. The movie also finely uncovers the prevailing gender discrimination at those times. The journalist in the movie, named ‘Naila’ (Anju Mahendru), though appreciate Silk’s so-called revolutionary attitude to fix the double standards of the society at the award evening, continues to remain the biggest critique throughout. Her advice to Silk ‘to remain as she is without thinking twice about what she is doing because her attitude will shape the revolutionary trend in society’ reaffirms the double standards because in spite of being a powerful agent of the society she was unable to publically propagate Silk’s bravado. Also the appreciation accorded to the ‘struggling’ director Ibrahim in the end, for making a movie of the same genre for which Silk was famous, depicts how the base level of subjective morality changes. When a man does the same thing as the woman was doing the ‘The Dirty Picture’ becomes ‘commercially viable film’. And to the author’s understanding, it was still Silk’s victory because ultimately what she said (“films run because of entertainment”) was proven right by Ibrahim adopting the similar strategy (minus Silk though) for his film.

Yet another example of gender bias—when the famous male film star ‘Surya’ felt offensive and said “pack up”, it was female actress’s (Silk) fault to respond to his humiliating remark of comparing a female actor in the movie to the plastic used for wrapping a cigarette packet. But when ‘Silk’ was ill treated by a director and said “pack up”, she was morally threatened of the expected downfall for saying no to work.

Though initially Silk was used for minting money by all stakeholders, her own unashamed gimmick of using her body as a short cut to success was not acceptable to the self-appointed moral protectors of the society. When her bold seductiveness became inevitable for anyone to ignore, it became the subject of criticism for being responsible for polluting the minds of male generation. By that logic, the criticism often accorded to smokers and drinkers should be considered ill-founded. If Silk is bad to show the world what they want to see then by the same logic, the cigarette and liquor manufacturers should be blamed for inducing innocent people into bad addictive life patterns. But ethics and morals are supposed to be the subjective cushions often used for human comfort. The movie shows how gradually Silk’s sexuality started haunting the very basis of the perceived ethics of the society. Her success posed doubts on the moral quotient of humanity because her success implied our appreciation of her skin show. Such stigmatic fear of facing the reality of the pretentious world forced humanity to put an end to further encounter with hard truths—putting an end to Silk. And she died. But the question remains whether it was just a suicide or a murder to cover up the naked realities which were uncovering with the shedding of her clothes. And she died all covered from head to toe in a red saree and a bindi. Though it was not indicated in the movie, but it seems that probably it was her innate desire to be seen as a woman, at least once, and not just as a body.