An irritating father and his exasperating daughter are knocking at the doors of 100 crore club at the box office. If “Queen” was the sign of times last spring, “Piku” is the game changer this summer. The media has gone overboard to analyse the film but director Shoojit Sircar wants to keep it simple. “I think audience have found a connection with the characters. Otherwise, you can’t have a universal hit these days.” Having said that, it is not easy film for beneath all the gaseous issues that it deals with. It takes on the taboo of virginity and talks of life with a purpose for women. “It is a reflection of the times we live in. Men are proving less worthy and the society’s attitude towards women is changing. I have more female assistant directors than men. We always knew girls are more caring than boys and today with their ability to multitask and financial independence they have acquired bigger roles in family and society. Marriage is not the ultimate aim for them anymore and the film deals with it. It is not the typical hero-heroine film where the heroine surrenders after showing some attitude.”
However, there are some who are piqued by “Piku”. They say that Sircar has painted faux feminism on screen and that he is romanticising a past that this generation has left behind for good. There is no point in eulogizing the irritating parent, that nosy neighbour for whom this generation grew past for good. And now sometimes look back through sanitised nostalgia pieces like “Piku”.
“The idea is to question the idea of development where there is no space for parents and where we are increasingly getting away from our roots. If they took care of us when we were young, isn’t it our job to make it little easy for them to negotiate old age. We often talk about parenting but what about taking care of parents. Having said that the film also says that death can be a happy moment in life.”
Sircar says he didn’t have a feminist agenda in mind while shaping Piku. “I see such girls around me and wanted to see them on screen. They squabble with their parents but they also take care of them and the two are not compartmentalised. You don’t know when slips into the other.”
“If I had to play to the gallery,” continues Sircar, “I would have made Rana romance Piku in Kolkata with four songs. The fact that they don’t even hold hands till the end show that we wanted to be honest to the characters,” says Sircar who grew up in a middle class family in Kolkata before moving to Delhi.
Shoojit’s grounding in the creative medium happened in theatre under the guidance of N.K. Sharma of Act One before he went on to assist Pradeep Sarkar on ad films. His ad films also have certain earthiness that question conventional logic in a fun way. Take his commercial for Airtel-Facebook where an old man with the help of his grandson finds the guy through Facebook, who once eve-teased his wife . He wants to break his teeth but discovers that they are no longer there.
Fate played similar games with Sircar. After “Yahaan”, his fresh take on militancy in Kashmir, got a cold reception, “Shoebite”, Sircar’s ambitious project with Amitabh Bachchan, got embroiled in a copyright war between two big banners. When it seemed he had to stick to the 30-second art, his collaborator Juhi Chaturvedi, who also has an advertising background, came with the idea of a sperm donor who can’t have his children. It had myriad possibilities to go profane but the duo managed to keep “Vicky Donor” funny without resorting to frivolous innuendos. Similarly, the very mention of bowel movement generates fart sounds in Bollywood. But Sircar managed to see the bigger picture.
At one level, Sircar says constipation is metaphor for letting go while at another it is an actual issue, particularly in Bengali families. “Constipation is a real issue and we kept it realistic. I haven’t tried to make it funny by using sounds and all. I didn’t try to sell it. In fact we have tried to make it elegant. I just wanted to see the daily life in a fun way. And I have noticed that often we are actually funny in our daily lives. If somebody records those conversations and plays for you chances are that you will laugh at them. This is what I have tried to achieve. I told my team that I have to go into a living room of Bhaskar Banerjee and Piku.”
How many times do you see a Hindi film heroine cleaning the kitchen or when she opens the door you see a hair clutcher in her mouth. He gives it to his background in advertising where one has to build characters in 30 seconds by breaking all the clutter around. He has used these skills adroitly in placing brands in screenplay as well. There is Syska, there is Ceat, there is Snapdeal and there are more but nothing is in your face. “I had told the companies that I won’t go out of the way to push the brand and most understand that audience don’t like it either.”
Irrfan has said that had there been a trained theatre actor playing Piku chances are that she would have become irritating. The fact that Deepika has a personality which makes even her squabbling sound serene helped. Shoojit agrees but adds that it has a lot to do with writing as well. “Fathers and daughters do fight like this. We have grown up watching father-son relationships on screen. It is perhaps the first time that audience have got to see a father-daughter bond in such detail.”
Sircar holds if you get the right director and script most commercial actors can act. “I had to feed Deepika with details but no hand holding was required. She was coming from the world of Farah Khan and here I wanted to create a girl in whom you can see your cousin sister who is working with passion. And she was natural even in pacharpachar !”
As for Amitabh Bachchan, Sircar says he wanted to see him as character. When Bachchan feels ordinary pains, people often get cut off. We saw it in “Yudh” on television. “When Bachchanji does like Bachchan then people expect him certain things from him. Here we made him the character. We cut the larger than life image off. After a long gap he has cut that Bachchanalia off and become an irritating old man. He wants to be challenged and we challenged him.”
With Irrfan, he was nervous. “He is our only international star. The fact that he picked ‘Piku’ over a Ridley Scott film gave me confidence that he must have found something in the script but it also generated pressure. I thought he might found fault in my direction style. Irrfan listens a lot to the writer and director. And his silence talks a lot. You don’t realise when he starts to act. For him an ad is enough to give the essence of the character.”
Bachchan has already anointed him as new-age Hrishikesh Mukherjee but Sircar has more to offer than justa slice of life. His last film was an espionage thriller in Sri Lanka and after a break he will take field for “1911”, a period film on Mohan Bagan’s victory against East Yorkshire Club in IFA Shield final. “I have no formula. I pick subjects that fascinate me and then delve into research.” We have heard the two words – formula and research in the same sentence before but the good thing is, this time the box office is also responding.
