Movie review: PK (new Bollywood pic, playing in many US art houses)

[Recursion]

Which God shall I worship? For there are two. The first is the God who made you, and about that God we know nothing. The second is the God you made, and that God is exactly like you: petty, greedy, and selfish; eager to meet with the rich while the poor must wait outside. -- PK

PK, written and directed by Rajkumar Hirani.

(The review below contains spoilers only if you have never seen a Bollywood movie before.)

I.

Jaggu (Anushka Sharma) is a young Indian journalist whose heart is broken by Sarafaraz (Sushant Singh Rajput), a young poet from Pakistan, while she is studying abroad in Europe. To make matters worse, the episode confirms both Jaggu’s family’s prejudices against muslims and an anti-Islamic prophecy by their avaricious Hindu priest (Saurabh Shukla).

Jaggu returns to Delhi and starts a career as a TV journalist, but her boss, once a brave investigative reporter, shies away from any of her stories about religion and assigns her instead to vapid human interest segments (“This man’s dog has attempted suicide three times already. Coming up next, we have a renowned pet psychiatrist…”). She despairs of ever finding a serious story until she meets a paan-chewing man on a train handing out “Missing” posters with pictures of deities on them, PK (Aamir Khan).

PK is an alien astronaut from a planet without language or clothing (bear with me here), and so without lies. He lands in rurual Rajasthan (note to Americans: that’s roughly like landing in Arkansas), and is robbed of his ship’s remote control by the first person he meets. Unable to summon his ship to return home, his unfamiliarity with human customs get him into several scrapes, as well as granting him his name (another note to Americans: “pee kay” is also how you pronounce a Hindi question that roughly means “are you drunk, sir?” — the subtitles just name him “Tipsy”). He takes up with a well-meaning but not very bright bandleader (Sanjay Dutt) who who tells him the thief probably fenced the valuable remote in Delhi.

Once in Delhi, PK sees the influence of religion and realizes that this God everyone talks about would be in a perfect position to help him recover his remote control. So follows a funny and occasionally touching sequence of PK trying each religion he can find in Delhi, and always failing to retrieve his remote, until he finds it being used as a fundraising prop by the same priest who had earlier warned Jaggu about Sarafaraz. Thrown out of the temple by security, he enters the despaired state in which Jaggu finds him, worrying that God has gone missing. A further series of misadventures leads to PK’s final confrontation with the priest on live TV, and the sort of resolution you expect from a Bollywood comedy.

II.

Religion can be an uncomfortable topic in Bollywood – or Hollywood, for that matter. Studios will show the same reluctance to anger religious groups as Jaggu’s boss. But religion has always played a crucial role in Indian film. The first Bollywood movie (released years before the first Hollywood movie) was a life of a Hindu saint, and it is traditional to begin any movie with a scene of a religious festival.

PK represents a new, more satirical take on religion, probably most famously done by OMG (Umesh Shukla‘s 2012 film), in which an agnostic meets Krishna while trying to sue God. While the two films’ religious messages would fit well in the kind of bland syncretism that Hollywood loves, they are a change for India which is currently seeing religious communalism grow in strength and confidence on multiple fronts. But PK is much more than throwing rocks at a stained glass window. Hirani and Khan meet the question of a lost mankind looking for our home with a remarkable sensitivity that I don’t see often in Hollywood (though Kevin Smith’s Dogma and Brian Dannelly’s Saved! come to mind).

What to make of PK the character? Much of what one makes of PK the film depends on this. He is, at a mimetic level, obviously a device, a child (he shows up naked and asks a lot of uncomfortable questions). And possibly he is also a tool at a diagetic level, since the end reveals the framing of the entire film to be Jugga giving a reading of her new novel, PK. Much of PK’s education takes the form of learning different ways humans either hide or lie. He becomes very good at detecting when religious leaders are lying for personal or corporate gain, but he very noticeably leaves the 900 pound gorilla unmentioned, and does not at any point ask if God himself is a lie. This is, to me, another sign of his mimetic role: that’s not a question the movie is interested in asking, so one should not expect the movie’s main conceit to ask it. In a Hollywood movie, Hirani might be accused of cowardice, of not taking the question to its logical conclusion. And, at a basic level, he probably would have had a harder time getting the movie made and cleared if he had gone there. But in the level of the story, it adds a touching earnestness to PK’s character.

PK’s home planet is without language or clothing. This is another point that may not hit Americans immediately, though Hirani is kind enough to include an exegesis in the form of one of PK’s speeches to the priest: clothing in India is a marker of religion; while it conceals the body it also reveals the community to which the body belongs. That clothing simultaneously hides and shows, protects and makes vulnerable, is fascinating to PK. Having no language or clothing, PK’s people have no religion. In fact, his first encounter with religion leaves him stunned and joyous: “These people have found the Being that manufactured them! Amazing!” And that gets to what is so endearing about the presentation of PK: as a “child”, he sees and hears things at face value. The suggestion is that religion answers a very fundamental need we all have (and the priest even makes a cynical version of that argument after PK smashes his “prosperity gospel”-type message). And certainly in mankind’s search for our place in the cosmos PK feels an echo of his strong desire just to go home.

III.

On the whole, PK sets up an amazing first half but has a second half that kind of fizzles. Part of this, I think, is pacing, and is affecting more Indian movies as US film idiom becomes more popular. The “western” pace, with its rapid cuts and wilder panning, is harder to maintain over more than 2 hours or so. But there are also some weaknesses in the second half of the script. Bollywood famously doesn’t do surprises very often – I doubt anyone even casually familiar with Indian cinema will be surprised that Sarafaraz’s jilting of Jaggu was actually a tragic miscommunication which is resolved at the end (hence, no spoiler space there). There is one big surprise rather late in the film, and while it gives some motivation to the final scene, to me it felt tacked-on and even cheap.

The actors’ performances were all solid. Sharma brings warmth and humor to Jaggu, and with her short hair and just-awkward-enough-to-be-charming dancing, she is reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn in her prime. In fact, she comes close to manic pixie dream girl territory, although the conventions of Bollywood plots prevent that ultimately. Shukla’s portrayal of the godman (the closest thing the movie has to an on-screen villain) is beautifully corpulent and venal. If there is a weak link, it seems to be Rajput, whose handsome, vapid Sarafaraz comes across flat next to Jaggu. Dutt’s bro-ish bandleader role is, well, Dutt to a T. Khan’s performance has received significant praise in Indian media, but I’m still not sure what to make of it. To what extent is standing around bug-eyed “acting”? That said, he does have some very touching moments of vulnerability, and when PK gets worked up for some reason or another, Khan truly comes alive and delivers. But I would have liked to see him explore PK’s “oddness” a little more, if that’s what the camera was going to spend that much time focusing on.

The soundtrack is a mixed bag. Chaar Kadam (“four steps”) is kind of cute, though it seems to confuse Bruges with Venice. Love is a Waste of Time is probably the weakest piece (and, in fact, ties down the plot in the PK/Jugga arm of the love triangle that seems grafted on and simply there for Bollywood convention). But Bagwah Hai Kahan Re Tu (“Seriously, God, where are you?”) is genuinely moving, particularly with the montage it is played over.

Finally, the art direction was quite good. Color is always important in Bollywood but it was particularly well used here. My favorite use was actually something of an Easter egg: PK is constantly chewing either carrots or paan (sort of like chewing tobacco), which are respectively the orange of Hinduism and the green of Islam. Nice touch.

IV.

Americans often complain that Indian movies are, to use TVTropes’ term, anvilicious: they have a message, and will beat audiences over the head with it, while singing, over the course of three hours. There’s probably some truth to that, but I would distinguish two types of subtlety. There is the subtlety of delivery method, and the subtlety of the message itself. Bollywood’s cinematic language does not do subtle delivery well, but Hollywood’s studio funding system does not do subtle messages very well, and the messages that are so ham-fistedly delivered in PK might be a difficult pitch for the US, even if the director delivered them less obviously. (Cynically, you might compare Bollywood today to the “golden age” of Hollywood, where the studios literally didn’t care about the script or the director’s vision as long as they got Star A on screen with Star B.)

In fact, some of the most profound statements in PK are quite subtle, and only tangentially related to the central theme. My favorite is probably PK’s discovery of money. Early on in Rajasthan, he finds a stack of rupee notes (yet another note to Americans: all rupee notes of any denomination have a picture of Gandhi on them). He sees them being exchanged for food, and buys some carrots with his. Convinced that the portrait of Gandhi is what people value, he “assembles a portfolio” of pictures of him, including Ashram posters, books, and postage stamps, but he cannot trade those for the carrots he likes very much. He concludes “the picture was only worth something when attached to the small pieces of paper”, and walks off leaving a book of Gandhi’s writings in the dust.

V.

When I review a Bollywood piece I am usually doing so for an imaginary American audience, and my first question is, “is this a good first Bollywood movie for an American?” I give an unqualified “yes” in this case. There are certainly a few jokes that require an understanding of India (Jaggu and Sarafaraz meet at a “Bachchan Recites Bachchan” performance in Bruges, for instance). Some of the religious imagery may be a bit opaque to an American (it was to me, and I live here). And I don’t know enough about the actual practice of Hinduism in India to say whether Hirani hit the mark there, but as a critique of “prosperity” Christianity in the US, his Hindu temple building campaign is spot-on.

Hirani’s last film, the blockbuster 3 Idiots, also starred Khan, and took on the Indian education system. The two seem to have a genuine rapport, though so far we have only seen Hirani direct Khan in an “idiot man-child” role, and I would like to see them expand that. Sharma has now played opposite SRK, Ranvir Singh, and Aamir Khan, which is as close to a Triple Crown as a Bollywood actress gets. I certainly hope to see more of her in the future.

PK is a bit meandering at 153 minutes (about 110 of which were needed). There is a single violent scene and a few vaguely sexual scenes (at least by American standards). There is a lot of questioning of the actual operations of religion, but it is done in a very sympathetic and sensitive context. The film passes the Bechdel test, too – Jugga discusses her frustrations finding a good story with her female coworker.

Most of all, it’s a touching and funny story about someone trying to get home, and learning about humanity in the process. Go see it, if your local arthouse is playing it.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Thank you for that review!

Contest is so important, of course, that bit about use of vegetables as symbols for countries is something I would not have noticed.

Looking forward to seeing the movie.