Pinjer - yet another great film remains unmade
The saga of lost opportunities continues...

According to a Times of India report Indian filmmakers have started looking for story ideas in the piles of literature. Is it a welcome news? What would happen if a bull goes rampaging into a sweet shop? He may eat all kinds of Divali sweets there, but his shit won't smell like sweet milk, Kesar, Badam, & Pista. It will all be bullshit, as usual. If the present breed of Indian filmmakers go rampaging into libraries and bookshops, can we expect them to give a better result? The smart ass copycats may probably graduate from Hollywood DVDs to Premchand but they will most probably do the same to Premchand, what they have been doing with 'Godfather'. Look at what Rakesh Roshan did to E.T. So, beware of all seemingly good Bollywood news, it may prove to be a pointer to a greater impending disaster.

Chandrprakash is neither a bull nor a pig. He is an intelligent man. He picked up a good story, like how Ramgopal Verma had picked up the story of 'Main Madhuri Dixit Banana Chahati Hoon'. Mere stories do not make great films though. Every film that is being made today is based on a good idea (borrowed, stolen or original). What spoils the fun is the lack of integrity and commitment to the art and craft of film making.

When creative arts are used deliberately to prove politically correct theories and as a tool of making ideological points, it leads to dilution and contamination of the truth. This in turn saps the strength, and energy of the creative effort and destroys its integrity. Pinjer suffers from this problem. One is surprised as to why the Hindu Muslim Bhai Bhai element had to be introduced in the plot. Even if it is part of Amrita Pritam's novel, and even if she wrote it with an agenda to promote Hindu Muslim amity, the filmmaker could have avoided those false moments. They are so obvious and a lay filmgoer can see that. It puts him/her off.

The character of Rashid and the need of the director and/or writer to be politically correct

Puro is abducted by Rashid. Why is the filmmaker trying to justify this abduction by emphasizing that Rashid's family was humiliated by the ancestors of Puro? This is perceived as pure bullshit by the viewers. Now the filmmaker has to produce additional bullshit to cover up for it. Thus he creates a bucketful of dung, that finally falls on his face. He cannot delve deep into the hell the girl's family has to go through in a Muslim dominated village any more . He has to give a guilt conscience to the Girl's father. A major incident that should have left the whole family scarred for life, is treated like a passing shot. Puro succeeds in running away from her captors but she is rejected by her loving mother and father. They have a strange reason. Who will marry their other daughter if people got to know about what happened to Puro? You get more of the same bullshit instead of getting it straight.

It could have been a simple thing. A Hindu girl has been abducted in a Muslim dominated area. Her parents have been threatened and left with no option but to give up on her. They must have had to go through hell before accepting this situation. They must have felt very helpless, the way parents of abducted Kashmiri Hindu girls feel in Kashmir. They can do nothing but to keep their mouth shut. They must have felt like that labourer whose beautiful wife is sexually exploited by a powerful contractor and he is forced to keep mum lest he may loose his job, life as well as wife. Look at Rashid here. He does not come out to be a powerful guy. Even his family looks like a bunch of pigmies. He is not a leader of his community either. The director shows Rashid and his family as the ones who have been exploited. He obviously wants to be politically correct. He cannot show a Muslim goon as barbaric and lustful who could do anything to acquire the object of his desire. He has to give Rashid useless moral justification to commit a heinous act. May be Manoj Vajpayee won't have shown interest in the role if it had been presented in extremely negative lights. So, the director resorts to a subterfuge. He makes the character politically correct. He destroys it in the process.

Then follows a series of lies. Puro's marriage to Rashid is bizarre. The director again tries to be politically correct. Puro has to say yes the third time. Why would she do that? Because she imagines she is getting married to her fiancé Ramchandra. Ha! One wonders why the director could not show Rashid marrying Puro forcibly. The age old filmy tricks could have come to the director's rescue. The bride could have been in a dazed state or she may have been threatened by Rashid that untold miseries will be brought on her family if she did not say yes to the Nikaah. All this could not be done because Rashid had to be politically correct, virtuous and just. Puro's abduction is the only black spot on his otherwise white bed sheet of sterling character. The director perhaps does not want to raise the heckles of Islamists and the Secularists by showing that a Nikaah could be based on coercion. This is where the film loses its audience.

Puro is married. We never get to know if she was converted to Islam except that a new name is tattooed on her arm. She gets pregnant. We don't know if she was forced into sexual submission by Rashid. She aborts her child. She does not want it to be born. Why? If she really hates Rashid, we never see that demonstrated anywhere in her behaviour. Her moments of extreme mental turmoil and conflicts remain unexplored. It weakens her character. The audience is all set to relate and empathize with Puro. However, it feels cheated when such obvious flaws in the screenplay assail its mental faculties.
Puro's character gets a further jolt by some rank bad acting by Urmila Matondkar. She caricatures emotions instead of living them. Chandrprakash should have worked on her. This was an opportunity for her to turn into a real actress by developing a good understanding of how an actor has to approach a complex character. She relies on her stock of well rehearsed and overused expressions, probably learnt from the days she used to be a child actor. However, to blame a poor actress for her poor performance in a film is a foolish thing to do. It was the director's responsibility to get what he wanted from the actress. One wonders if he was sure of what he wanted from Urmila. She gave what he took, and not what she could have under the baton of a competent director.

Puro's character gets diluted and damned in all these processes.

Now, if you have two mucked up and weakened characters that are central to the story, you cannot make a good film. An overloaded old Chevrolet bus running to and fro on dusty village roads, and houses made of handmade bricks cannot save the film. We are told that it took more than five years to have the script ready. Chandrprakash has been eating, drinking, and breathing this idea, we are told. He may even be sleeping with it. That is why he has screwed it up.

Now a few words about the Times of India reviewer Jitesh Pillai's views about Pinjer. He writes, 'Moreover, during the partition, Hindus and minorities suffered alike. The film seems to suggest that the minority communities were those who wreaked havoc. Not done. Not done.' This great historian of a film critic should be despatched to Pakistan and Bangladesh to learn that Hindus are in minority in these countries. He should be made to stay in a remote Bangladeshi village with his mother and sister to know some of the ground realities faced by the minorities in these countries, especially the Hindus as Christians can always seek the help of the Pope and Bush. The partition happened because Muslims wanted it. Hindus did not ask for it. They were forced to agree to the idea of partition under the threat of bloody direct action of Jinnah and other Muslim leaders in the areas where Muslims held total sway. He should read history, not the one written by Marxists and Secularists, to learn the state of minorities (Hindus) in erstwhile East Bengal and West Punjab. Most of the governments in these provinces were run by Muslim League. And what sort of a film critic is he? He is asking the filmmaker to secularize his work. Is the film art going to be subjected to secularization Chutiapa now? 'Not done', 'Not done' says this third rate film critic. What the fuck is wrong with this asshole? Pillai Bete don't behave like a tight assed, screwed up, and  bastardised great grandson of a pigshit secularist. Moreover, he gives the same rating to Ssshhh as Pinjer. Pillai meri jaan, kha pee ke review zaroor likho, lekin sab sharam haya bech ke kha jana theek baat nahin hai. Pinjer is five star dinner compared with the Ssshhh shit.

Chandrprakash has failed because he has tried to play the balancing act to please the secularists. The characters of Rashid and Puro are the victims of this strategy. They meander about in the story with weak motivations. He should not have bothered about the Hindu Muslim issue here. He should have concentrated on the characters and their travails and turmoil. He should have even ignored the original writer's secularist agenda, if she had any. Rashid's redemption should have happened towards the end of the film. Instead of this, Rashid is redeemed in the beginning itself, as he is projected as a man of conscience and a saviour of Puro. Does he not save her from destruction and death by marrying her?

Screenplay is full of problems

You come across a literary piece of work. You want to make a film out of it. How do you go about adapting it? You develop your screenplay. A novel is a long story. A commercial Hindi film's story cannot generally go beyond three hours. You have to pick and choose your characters and plots carefully out of the novel. Richard Attenborough did a good job of Gandhi's story. Chandrprakash has failed in this department. His screenplay has gone awry. It has no focus. It fails to pinpoint and develop crucial moments that could have carried forward the central story, and kept the viewer with it. Some of the faux pas can be corrected even now. Puro's mother giving birth to a male child, and calling him her only son, whereas Puro already has a grown up brother. This is irresponsible filmmaking. Seema Biswas's character can be easily deleted. This too was kept in to placate the secularists it seems. However, these are minor things.

And why the songs in Pinjer are in Punjabi while the characters speak Hindi?

In spite of all this, Pinjer is a better film than insipid films like Baghban, Raja Bhaiya, Boom, Footpath, Mumbai Matinee, Jogger's Park, Gangajal, and the rest that have been released in the past few months. Some of them have done well according to their producers.  One hopes Pinjer does OK enough business in days to come.  It may.

And if Subhash Ghai can proclaim that his third grade film Jogger's Park is worthy of an Oscar nomination, Pinjer is worth ten and Lagaan was worth hundred Oscar nominations.