Review: Limited Run
PK | Rajkumar Hirani | India | 2014 | 153 min
AMC Star 18 Fitchburg, now playing through January 8»
Don’t wait for The Interview to come to town. If you’re looking for the most controversial film to play in Madison so far in 2015, check out PK, the film that angry Hindu nationalists are protesting across India. The entertaining sci-fi satire of organized religion is far more pointed than expected for a mainstream Bollywood film (thus the protests), but it falls just short of maintaining a completely satisfying balance of music, melodrama, and comedy.
Usually by the time I get around to seeing Bollywood films at AMC Star 18 Fitchburg, it is too late to encourage you go to out and see it. In the case of PK, the latest vehicle for Aamir Khan (Dhoom 3, Ghajini), its run is now entering its third week in Madison, and the film is projected to become the biggest Bollywood box office hit of all time (beating last year’s Dhoom 3). Given the interest in all of the dick and poop jokes in the needlessly controversial The Interview*, perhaps Madisonians might be interested in urniation-on-temple-wall jokes in a genuinely controversial film. I’ll focus here on the film rather than the controversy, but a good place to start for more about the protests include coverage in the Times of India and The Guardian.
PK film is certainly entertaining, and often quite surprising in its (relatively) bold stance on organized religion, but the main reason to see PK is for its star power and chemistry between Khan as a stranded alien and Anushka Sharma (Band Baaja Baaraat, Jab Tak Hai Jaan) as Jaggu, an ambitious television reporter. The plot’s crucial romance, however, is between Hindu Jaggu and Muslim Sarfaraz (Sushant Singh Rajput), which of course is harder to tell Jaggu’s traditional Hindu parents about than telling them about an alien. Relegating that romance to the first and third acts leads to some unsatisfying plot gymnastics in the climax. The music in the film, while occasionally fantastic, also has an unbalanced placement, so much of your response to the film will depend on how patient you are with the satire. Despite these shortcomings, if you are not provoked to burn the theater down you will probably leave the theater with a smile on your face. In my book, that’s still a good thing.
Khan’s PK is stranded on Earth in remote Rajasthan at the start of his research on this planet because his shiny pick-up beacon is mistaken for jewelry and stolen almost immediately. He eventually earns the moniker “PK” because it phonetically matches the word for “tipsy,” which everyone he meets believes he must be based on his strange behavior. After receiving some initial help from a local musician, Bhairon Singh, played vibrantly by Sanjay Dutt (Munna Bhai M.B.B.S, Lage Raho Munna Bhai), PK searches for his beacon in Delhi, where he is told repeatedly through many common phrases that only God** can help him. Not knowing who this God fellow is, PK begins a search only discover that different people are telling him very different things about Him. While most of the jokes about various organized religions seem relatively harmless, it is not surprising that some fundamentalists have taken umbrage, regardless of the filmmakers stated intent of not meaning to offend anyone. When PK discovers that no specific religion can lead him to God (and help him find his beacon), he searches for God as a “missing person.”
Both Jaggu and her news producer boss, Cherry (Boman Irani, Happy New Year), seem particularly cynical about religion and spirituality, if not (dare I say it, in the mainstream Bollywood context) agnostic or athiest. In Jaggu’s case, this seems to be in response to her fundamentalist parents with whom she has been estranged since her doomed relationship with Sarfaraz. Cherry goes from a hardline position of avoiding religion as a topic for broadcasts (due to previous painful experiences with protesters) to green-lighting Jaggu to feature PK in a series of popular stories that question the validity of organized religions. PK himself, however, never quite gives up on the idea of God. In a line that might be particularly controversial to fundamentalist ears, PK asserts, “Believe in the god who created you…not in the god you created.”*** The filmmakers want protesters to remember the first part of the line, but protesters are likely to remember the last part.
The musical highlights are in the first third of the film. “Chaar Kadam” (“Four Steps”), central to the romance between Jaggu and Sarfaraz, evokes the instrumentation, vocals, and visual style of classic Bollywood of the 1940s and 1950s, and provides much needed relief to those tired of repetitive Bollywood Hindi-pop. But the best musical sequence, musically, lyrically and visually is “Tharki Chokro,” which features Sanjay Dutt’s Bhairon and his band making observations about PK’s odd behavior. If you watch the video clip below, understand that PK must touch a human hand in order to absorb his or her language. After he is rejected by Bhairon, his attempts to touch female hands is of course also frowned upon. Later musical sequences are charming, but none of them match the energy of these early numbers.
Charming is an appropriate word for PK as a whole. It clearly never means to offend anyone but the most easily offended. Like PK himself, PK only aspires to come closer to understanding the way this odd little planet works.
* I haven’t seen The Interview yet, but I trust that it is less than controversial to assert without seeing it that it does have dick and poop jokes and that its controversy is not warranted by its content, based upon reviews like Andrew Lapin’s at The Dissolve. (His is the first review of many that came up after the search “the interview movie dick and poop jokes”.)
**I have to double check to see if the subtitles capitalized God in the subtitles in some contexts. I’m choosing to capitalize here because I’m referencing the concept across several religions, not any specific god within Hinduism.
***I’ll need to see the film again to get the exact wording; the line has been transcribed differently in different reviews and articles, but this is the spirit if not the letter of PK’s sentiment.