PIKU IS ME, I AM PIKU
Like everyone else, I brought back a lot of laugh-out-loud and many we-too moments from Piku, but there was also something else: Piku was me, I was Piku. In their leading lady, director Shoojit Sircar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi have given us a flesh-and-blood heroine that could be any of us. Like Piku, I am a woman who manages both work and home, each tougher than the other on any given day. Like Piku, I am forever on the edge and a bit rough around the edges. Like Piku, I am perpetually on a short fuse, but when I am at boiling point, it doesn’t take much to cool me down. Like Piku, I have a tough-as-nails exterior, but just a kind word, a simple gesture or a bright smile is enough to make your way into my heart.
In an industry where women characters are either relegated to doing two-bit roles or made to beat men to pulp in the name of emancipation — Mardaani to NH10 — Piku is the woman we all are. Exasperated with our parents often, but never losing our love and respect for them; adept at handling a major office presentation, but never shying away from getting our hands dirty to clean a clogged kitchen sink; asserting our independence and not allowing anyone to walk over us, but having values ingrained strongly enough to not argue with our elders — Piku gives up the steering wheel when dad Bhaskor gets hyper about her driving on the highway… as a child, I stayed away from the swimming pool because my dad was hydrophobic.
The most refreshing bit about Piku is the way it treats the dad-daughter dynamic — Piku knows that Bhaskor is a hypochondriac and yet she’s willing to play along when he constantly complains about his health, checking his blood pressure and his body temperature every now and then. They argue, they scream, they talk freely, they almost claw out each other’s eyes… but at the end of the day, Baba and Piku are inseparable.
I also loved how the film treats sex from the woman’s perspective — Bhaskor may not want Piku to get married (he dismisses marriage as “low IQ”), but is well aware that her co-worker bunks up with her in her room ever so often. No hue and cry over Chhobi Mashi asking Piku whether her sex life is active. “It’s a need, Mashi,” Piku states, nonchalantly.
While most of our films always concentrate on reaching a fixed denouement, Piku lets it all hang refreshingly open-ended. Will Piku lead the life that she couldn’t when Baba was around? Will she end up with Rana? Will there be a ‘Piku 2’? Let’s just wait and watch.
Priyanka Roy
A HEART-WARMING MOTION-MEETS-EMOTION TALE
It was rather ironic that on the day I watched Piku, I was suffering from poop problems. Several trips had been made to the restroom from early morning so when I saw Bhaskor Banerji at the late night show, wanting to let it all out, the truth of one line never hit me harder: insaan ka emotion uske motion ke saath juda hua hai!
A film based on constipation can go horribly wrong. But my gut feeling was that Piku would be a funny film. What it also turned out to be is a heartwarming tale of a father and daughter. The joy of seeing the nuances of an elderly Bengali man (played out perfectly by Amitabh Bachchan, thanks to perhaps his many years spent in Calcutta) and the city where I grew up, was not any less than Bhaskor’s joy after he had the best dump of his life!
Comedy-drama Piku will have you laughing out loud (like when Irrfan draws out the digestive tract) and rolling out tears (when Bhaskor...). That’s enough emotion to get you moving!
A t2 member who doesn’t want to be named... for obvious reasons!
DINING TABLE POOP TALK!
I loved Piku because it depicted the inseparable and indescribable bond between a daughter and a father in a non-stereotypical manner.... no rona-dhona and no “I love you, dad,” kind of mushy lines. The two are always at loggerheads and yet you can feel the strong emotional bond. The banter between the two is hilarious and so very real. The best bit for me? The way dad-daughter indulge in poop talk at the dining table so naturally! Whenever I do that, I earn stern and judgemental glances from people :(
Ratnalekha Mazumdar
SUBTLE AND UNDERSTATED YET HARD-HITTING
Bhaskor Banerji believes Elvis Presley had died of constipation. During lunch, he tries to explain how Elvis must have collapsed on the commode while shitting. Piku gives an instant “ewwww” expression and I laugh, thinking it to be a natural reaction to ‘shit talk’ at the dining table. What I didn’t expect was the next line from Piku: “Dahi ko fridge mein nahin rakha? Khatta ho gaya hai”… And I realised discussing shit is more usual than yogurt gone sour in the Banerji household. That’s Shoojit Sircar, playing it subtly and yet hitting you hard with almost every scene. Yes, the actors were no doubt superb, but it was the subtlety with which Sircar and his scriptwriter Juhi Chaturvedi handled each and every scene till the end that gripped me.
Sibendu Das
MY MORNINGS ARE “LIKE NEVER BEFORE”!
The other day a friend of mine told me that he had started cycling, chewing his food really slowly, like a cow, and ‘procuring’ tulsi leaves from his neighbour’s garden after hoodwinking the dog. I thought my friend was blabbering on as usual, until I watched Piku and the gravity of his situation hit home! Piku has had crazy effects on people. Even as my friend deals with his irregular bowel movement, I’ve found myself bursting into laughter at inappropriate moments thinking about some of the funny situations and lines in Piku. My faves? When Rana tells Bhaskor to sing a relevant song in the car and not Path jodi na shesh hoy, or when Bhaskor rattles off TMI about Piku like: “She is financially independent, sexually independent…” at a party.
The constant bickering between the family members is a hoot, along with the dinner table conversations. I could so easily identify with Piku’s situation and in the way she was trying to strike a balance between family and work, often blowing her top at her father’s inexplicable actions. How many times have we shouted at our parents when we thought that they were acting like children, and then regretted it later? With Piku on my mind, mornings on the singhasan are “like never before”!
Arindam Chatterjee
WE THE BONG BRIGADE... JHARNA GHEE TO TULLU PUMP
Piku is just what the doctor would order at the end of a very long and tiring day. In fact, Piku will make you laugh so much that you can replace the apple with it. The overriding poop theme is exalted to such strange levels of absurdity that Bhaskor Banerji’s singhasan to Irrfan Khan’s diagram of the bowel system will continue to tickle you long after you’ve left the hall.
All my apprehensions about “potty” humour were laid to rest from the first scene. Instead, Shoojit Sircar’s brand of wit offers a certain joy in the quirks and obsessions starting with Jharna Ghee to the Tullu Pump that define us Bongs. Also the realisation that bodhojom and constipation ranks a close second after the biggest Bangali fear “thanda legey jabe”, little of which has really changed for the monkey-tupi brigade.
It is also heartening to see Amitabh Bachchan, the adult who’s started to age backward as not repulsive but endearing especially for all his potty crazy schemes. I just wish his Bengali was a little less caricaturish. Fun appearances by our very own Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury in his batik painted fatua or Raghubir Yadav spilling a secret in Einstein-ish hair make Piku an easy-breezy joyride.
Mohua Das
“FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS?” WOW, OH WOW!
I know Piku is about the beautiful-yet-vexing bond between parent and child — and I seriously think Shoojit Sircar had a periscope trained on my family’s living room while researching for this film — but there’s something else that jumped out of the script for me. Two words — “Need-based”. So Piku is a loving (and extremely irritable) 30-something daughter to a cantankerous 70-year-old. She lives with her dad and doesn’t seem anywhere near getting married. But she has a sex life, a “need-based” relationship with her buddy and colleague, Syed. Someone is acknowledging an adult woman’s need for sex? In India? In a Bengali household? In a mainstream Bollywood film with A-list actors? Wow, oh wow!
One morning when Piku emerges from her bedroom, Syed emerges behind her, complete with yawns and bed hair. No one in the household bats an eyelid. Of course Piku’s dad knows about this man, strangely enough so does her Mashi and other relatives. And finally, just because Piku has what I call a “friends with benefits” and Shoojit Sircar calls need-based relationship, doesn’t stop Piku from flirting with Rana.
Piku’s father is waging a war not just against constipation but also against “low IQ” thoughts, which means he’s a champion of women’s liberation but even my ears were ringing when he tells a young man at a party that his daughter’s not a virgin. I was glad when Piku addressed this particular point during one of her rants against her father. Overall I loved Piku, for the motion, the emotion and the “action”.
Samhita Chakraborty
HOME-MADE NIMBU PAANI IN SUMMER
I wanted to watch Piku only to see Deepika Padukone, but the “motion” topic made me little apprehensive... how much “shit” talking can one deal with in a story. But for Deepika, I decided to watch the film and came back home, moved and with moist eyes.
Piku is an ordinary story with some extraordinary moments between father-daughter which I could relate to. Bachchan’s Bhaskor is quite similar to many shades of my father — from the things he says to how he panics if he has constipation or a mild fever. The biggest credit goes to Shoojit Sircar who beautifully captures the dad-daughter relationship with strong Bengali touches — begun bhaja to kochuri to little girl rehearsing her music in the morning.
Anupam Roy’s soulful Bezubaan and Journey song lingered even after leaving the theatre. Finally, Piku was like having a glass of home-made nimbu paani in summer — nothing fancy, yet refreshing enough to make me happy.
Pramita Ghosh
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