Movie Review: 'The Dirty Picture'

Let me take up the title first - If one believes that skin-show beyond the need and letting groaning button turned on while having or imitating sex is dirty, it’s certainly is a dirty picture. But, hold your horses folks, it’s not vulgar.

Detail:

The movie opens with a story of a girl named Reshma (Vidya Balan), an aspiring actress with a view why-think-twice-when-one-life, fantasizing age-old superstar Suryakant (Naseeruddin Shah) while showering. She goes on trying to be an actress believing that she has something which others don’t, but none offers her the role. Due to her persistence and confidence, she gets a break in a dancing number and she grabs the chance by both hands. In her first shot, she turns into the steamy dancing girl making the whip make way through her deep curves while leaving the audience with jaws dropped down, mouths open and eyes lustfully wide. She becomes the ultimate sex-siren on the block and gears up to set the mercury soaring with her steamy screen presence and thereby attracting a huge fan base of lechers. She gets famous as 'Silk'. This popularity puts her in a position to work with her old fantasy Suryakant, a big womanizer, self-proclaiming to have slept with half a grand babes and still shamelessly counting number in his years of religious tours. Such filthy man is born to take advantage of anyone with only x chromosomes, so just imagine the situation when he meets this bold newcomer who is more than willing to do anything for getting film projects – the warmth turns to heat and heat turns to fire. He leaves her when he realizes that she can be threat to his marriage. 

Silk on the other hand, unaffected by this, picks his younger brother and aspiring writer Ramakant (Tusshar Kapoor) but neither of them knows what they’re into and their ways are parted smoothly like none cares, including the director Milan Luthria. Now, there’s a proud director in the movie named Abraham (Emraan Hashmi) who royally hates Silk for her sleaziness as he believes in making films which hit either brain or heart and not any other part of human body in order to luring mass to the cinema hall. But his face-to-face encounter with Silk changes his ideology and he starts dancing to her silky smooth tunes of entertainment. As time passes by, due to her arrogance and audacity, Silk becomes an unwelcome pain to everyone and ignored by most including her mother which makes her shallow and lifeless. Finally, Abraham is seen realizing him falling in love with her but he gets late in stopping her from choosing her way out of this dirty world. 

Dissection:

Naseeruddin Shah and Emraan Hashmi do justice to their given roles. The song of Vidya and Emraan is totally uncalled for. It’s a bad, boring patch. Vidya is unquestionably the showstopper. Even though she proudly exhibits her pendulous fleshes which in today’s time is a mockery-material, her inviting body language with unrestrained straight talk, luscious lips-pressing and seductive eye-winking prove her unshakable self-confidence and make her click hard. 

There is a sudden character mismatch found in the letter which Silk leaves for Abraham at the end, which has her view of the world. She is, for a change and for a moment, portrayed sentimental but it doesn’t sink well or sound genuine as she only keeps on blowing the trumpet that she is ‘entertainment’ and continuously keeps on breaching her own character lows. So when people take you seriously for your way of entertainment, you can’t be the source of ‘enlightenment’ at the end to show your soft side! She comes across as a fluffy hare raring to find lion and dancing its way to his mouth to be eaten in order to be noticed by the world. So, no sympathy granted here. 

Tusshar looks as pitiable in the movie as in reality for lack of films. My sincere condolences are just for him for his real life situation than for Silk for her end. By the way, on this note, the way Abraham is attracted towards Silk despite he despised her all through the movie, is as mysterious as the need of Tusshar’s role for this movie.

Deduction:

In the dirty film industry, one aspiring actress comes, stumbles, learns, screws her life in every way and finally ends it. The Dirty Picture is a justification of why dirty pictures are made, why they work for mass audience and still why they’re not given an open welcome. It tries to portray that such movies are only embraced behind the closed doors of the house and not in public at large. But don’t apply your mind. No message is manifest unless you’re desperate to find one.

Go for this movie. It can’t belong to the best of the lot but it’s a sincerely brave attempt. It’s a total fun, especially when its super-bold one-liners with repartees only are worth your time and ticket and the foot-tapping, shoulder-jumping number ‘Ooh Lala’ with the ‘entertainment’ of 2 hours and 20 minutes becomes the big cherry on the cake!