Dirty Picture

Distorted Picture should have been a better choice for a title.

I am not privy to Silk Smitha’s personal life or for that matter, not really aware of what exactly happened to her in the last few years of her stormy career as a seductress on screen. But can say with fair amount of certainty that what one gets to see in Dirty Picture is a somewhat grotesque distortion of her volatile life. As someone very passionately involved with Tamil films in the 80s and 90s my knowledge of the times and lives of many personalities of those times can be trusted for reasonably good reporting!!!

Firstly, there is this tendency to consider everyone south of Bhopal as a Madraasi. And the director of Dirty Picture is no exception. The four states of Southern India have fairly unique and distinct cultural lineage and even the languages are as similar as chalk and cheese. The south indian film industry had its nerve centre in Madras those days and therefore served as a veritable attraction point to every aspirant. And the industry was and is dominated by Telugu and Malayalam speaking people. Call it talent or beauty but that’s a reality. There was a time when tamil film music did not have one singer with Tamil as mother tongue.

Silk Smitha hailed from Eluru in AP and spent her early years there. For someone exploited in early-life, it may have been a painless passage into the vamp like overtly sexy roles that she was required to perform on screen. She may not have had many credits as the leading lady of a film while she would be the central action due to her bold performances in almost all the movies she acted. Was ok as a dancer and tolerable as a seducer. Maybe it was paucity of such talent that made her successful. As a school boy, I too suffered those unavoidable crushes but it was hardly remembered as I grew.

Coming to the movie, Vidya does a neat job. Or she does her best to live that role – but it is often like that unpopular MF Hussain’s portrayal of Hindu Goddesses. However voyeuristic you try to become while depicting these deities, the beauty cannot be removed. Vidya’s natural beauty is a drag on the vamp like portrayal required for a movie like this. One is intuitively drawn towards that sterling performance by Kangana Raut in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion (in my opinion one of the finest movies of the last decade). Vidya’s acting in the last 20 minutes is quite brilliant (yes she acts and not ‘lives’) and it is amazing how she could transform her physical built to adapt to the needs of the role.

The film-shots shown in the first half have that flavor and richness (sic) of the Telugu movies where we got to see the Krishnas/NTRs/ANRs dancing with young belles (who were the heroines in which Silk was only a cabaret dancer for one song in villain’s den) against a backdrop of riotous Holi like explosions. The settings seen in the few duet songs were all part of the Telugu films – but quite popular and appealing those days. And Silk had nothing to do with these dance and songs. The director was mis-directed presumably.

Re-recording and cinematography are mediocre and sometimes a pain. BGS is somewhat reflective and misses the theme totally. Shah does a neat job – and this is the only area where the director excels in highlighting how the plus-70 heroes were a dominant force among minus-18 heroines.

Overall, not a movie that would have mattered if I missed it. Maybe if we didn’t have a Silk Smitha in real life, this movie may have looked different.

First Time Fined

    
I was caught over-speeding on the motorway and was fined a penalty of the equivalent of USD 70.

The penalty was not big but the impact it had on my ego was quite large.

This is the first time in my 17 years’ of car-driving I have paid a penalty. Must equally be true that it is possibly the first time I have broken the law. Or that is what i implicitly believe.

I may have paid many penalties in life – not all penalties for my mistakes you see – but this one has left me embarrassed. I foolishly tried to contest that I was driving fast but not faster enough to be punished but who can beat technology-the highway camera showed proof that i was speeding at a little over 100 when the limit was 80.

Talking of ego, the first driving lesson I had was in my brand new car in the early 90s. I couldn’t get down to the act of asking someone to loan his car for my driving experiments. (its a different matter that the driving school refused to allow me to drive anything other than its dual-brake car).  May be out of fear or that stupid morality, the first resolution I made was never ever to break any traffic rules. To me amber was red if i had to stop and amber was never green if i had to move.  Would take pride in stopping at red signals even at midnight and when alone. Speed limit was obeyed always furiously but when there were no obstructions, i would go crazy behind the wheels. That pride of being a virgin-lawbreaker is lost

But later in my years  I realized I can’t be too rigid about rules as i couldn’t always have someone to drive me when inebriated. So that may always remain the reprieves I have had in the eyes of traffic law. We often build around us strong walls of morality initially and then build weak bridges of ways to circumvent and beat them. We live by examples we come across presumably.

Brings to the fore the karma theory behind mistakes and penalties.