Piku: Awesome toilet humour

Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Irrfan Khan, Deepika Padukone, Moushumi Chatterjee, Raghuvir Yadav

Rated: 9/10

If Vicky Donor brought the sperm out of the closet in style, Piku tells you with equal panache that shit happens because that’s life. And how when shit doesn’t happen, neither does life. The beauty of this unique film by Shoojit Sarkar is that though it is obsessively centralised on the constipation issues of an old man, it is the most free flowing toilet humour that Bollywood has shat, that too through an entire two-hour film.

It is Sarkar’s cinematic acumen and more than that scriptwriter Juhi Chaturvedi’s extra-ordinary ordinariness in storytelling that makes this one that hatke blockbuster which comes in only once in a while to gently sweep you off your feet. It is ordinary to be constipated at 70 and it is even more ordinary to obsess about it, like Amitabh Bachchan does as a 70-year-old bhadralok Bengali in Piku. What’s extra-ordinary about this is that Sarkar opens a window of life through toilet blues. He tells you an engaging story of a daughter committed to her eccentric and health-obsessed father, keeping her life on hold for him; he tells you of the insecurities of old-age in a quirky format; he brings in romance which never speaks or yells, preferring instead to just glide in silently and tug at your heart strings; he never shies away from making potty the real hero of this film when there are towering personalities like Big B and Irrfan and Deepika as propelling options.

It needs courage and gumption, not to mention genius, to belt out what would otherwise be considered crass and out-of-line issue to transport to the big screen in such entirety. Potty humour, till now, had been used as a slapstick comic relief in a movie — to be enjoyed in a jiffy and flushed down the commode before it becomes disgusting. But now with Sarkar and Chaturvedi compelling you to acknowledge and applaud its presence in such a big way, there’s no question around the statement that indeed, emotion can be tied to motion and engagingly at that. Of course, without the towering presence of Amitabh Bachchan and his amazing histrionics, this film would not have been possible but the fact that Sarkar gives you equally towering moments through Irrfan, Deepika, Raghuvir and Moushumi Chatterjee is what makes this one a movie of substance.

Bachchan’s diction, his capturing of an old Bengali man’s character, his immaculate display of eccentricities and even his gait gives all the muscle and flesh to Piku. It is a beauty how Sarkar also shows the Bhoskar as an icon of woman liberation and a father who is poker faced, quite publicly vocal and totally unnerved about his daughter’s “un-virgin-ness”, her sexual and financial freedom which he feels strongly should not be flushed down the commode of a traditional marriage. Deepika as Piku tells you how her beauty and acting can coincide and her portrayal of controlled and yet explosive frustration about her life being on a standstill due to her father is a revelation. She can act and how!

Irrfan is a delight to be with despite his unkempt looks and quirky, wide-eyed and open mouthed portrayal of humour. He stands out despite Big B and that’s what makes him a differently enabled actor of immense worth. But returning to Sarkar and his film, it is so delightfully everyday and aam admi that there may not be a single family that will not identify with Piku’s situation, with Bhoskar’s constipation, Irrfan’s balanced reaction to a crazy family and with Deepika’s stand-out control of her senses.

Sarkar makes you laugh at shit instead of being disgusted by it. The humour is so evenly embedded through the 2-hour-10-minute mosaic of life that you laugh at the situations and also take in the questions that are thrown up in this absolutely funny journey by road from Delhi to Kolkata — a journey which is topped by a makeshift commode over the vehicle and a chassis of daily-ness that keeps churning your big intestine of life as it happens without making any big statements and yet being the biggest statement ever to, well, fall into the pot. Riveting toilet humour, even more alluring slice of life, one must admit! 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 10 May, 2015