Let me get this straight. Dirty Picture is a soft porn film. It’s a film where we see a lot of cleavage and breasts, in the name of a biopic. This makes sense. In the Aviator, a biopic about Howard Hughes, you saw planes. In JFK, you saw the assassination of John F Kennedy. Thus, in a biopic about Silk Smitha, thou shall see heaving of breasts!
I was really surprised when I heard that there was a biopic on Silk Smitha, and not say Madhubala or Parveen Babi, whose lives were much more tragic yet remained in the popular domain of film press for years. The fact that they chose Silk, meant the idea was clear. ‘Boob-y’ traps
The movie does take us through the nothings, the ups and the down of Silk Smitha. Blah Blah Blah. What do I care? I didn’t care when she was alive, and I did read loads of crappy Tamil magazines to know that the quintessential item girl was sleeping with everyone in the Tamil film industry and was resigned to work on soft porn films. I also didn’t care when she died. I didn’t say a prayer. I genuinely had a ‘this was bound to happen’ thought and moved on with my life.
Thus requiring an emotion out of a shallow person like me for a biopic on Silk is waste of time. But if you told me that I was going to get titillated by Vidya Balan, playing a soft porn actress in the film, then game on! So I shall keep the emotions aside and put forth an honest review of a soft porn film.
Making a soft porn film is like making an action film. You need action in every sequence in an action film. You need sleaze in every sequence in a soft porn film. – visual and verbal. There is enough oomph in every scene of TDP that makes you admire the unabashedness(if there is such a word). When there is no cleavage heaving, Vidya titillates with orgasmic sounds as playback to a porn film. When she is driving a car she talks dirty while changing gears. When she is smoking, she blows rings to drive you crazy. And in the scenes where there is no visual sleaze, the director plays with the dialogues and makes you nervously laugh out loud. Milan Luthria succeeds in making you believe, ‘yeh ladki aise hi aag lagayegi’
Vidya Balan is great as a soft porn heroine. She should do more of this. The seduction of Naseer, the cat and mouse with Emraan and the blowing away (literally) of Tusshar are all shock worthy. You can’t believe your eyes that the girl who was a girl next door in Parineeta, or an ugly sister in NOKJ, is a porn star. Very Jekyll and Hyde. The transition from Sari clad, goody-two shoes, temple-goer by day to a soft porn star by night, is commendable. I say she should be in Big boss 6 or in every Tamil movie I watch.
My only issue was that towards the end of the film, Vidya became way too fat. I understand that my Tamil instincts should succumb to such puppy fat but it was border lining on salivating on a cow. Here again, instead of biopic realism, they should have stuck to their guns of making an outright soft porn film.
Naseer is good with his sleazy one-liners, Tusshar is cute but acts massively gay for a porn film and my favourite in the movie, Emraan, is the true male star. But they are just pawns in a porn (that was much better when said than read!)
If you are alone at home with a beer in your hand and your wife and kids have gone to the zoo, take a watch...Dirty picture is your Indian fetish come true!
