The Dirty Picture is the latest Hindi movie to have come out of Balaji Telefilms, Ekta Kapoor’s production house. Going by the promos, you might expect The Dirty Picture to have lots of sex and sleaze in it. Instead, The Dirty Picture focuses on the tragedy of a real life sex siren who excited and entertained thousands of fans, but met a comfortless, tragic end.
Vidya Balan has shown plenty of character, charisma and cleavage while portraying the role of this popular item girl of the ’80s. Full of entertaining dialogues and music, The Dirty Picture is a nice movie to go watch with a bunch was friends.
The Dirty Picture Movie Review
Coming from the talented duo of Director Milan Luthria and script writer Rajat Arora (notorious for Once Upon A Time In Mumbai) , The Dirty Picture is an extremely courageous attempt to picturise the life and times of South Indian superstar, Silk Smitha. Brave, outrageous, and entertaining, the film thankfully manages to be far from from vulgar or offensive.
Ooh La La, a creative, peppy song with the classic Bappi da tunes from the 80s shows us something rare – Naseer bhai dancing!
“I had to practise so hard for the song. Not so much the dance moves, but the attitude and the body language. I have been pretty pathetic about the dances I have done so far.” – Naseeruddin Shah
Synopsis of The Dirty Picture
The Dirty Picture shows the evolution of a wild village girl into a sex symbol who ends up fighting fame, criticism, alcohol and finally, death. The moment lights dim in the theatre, Vidya Balan transforms into Reshma, a mischievous village lass living near Chennai. Even as a kid, she is a wild bird and wants to escape an unempowering life of a village girl for she dreams to become a superstar in Kollywood. She wants to romance Suryakant, an ageing South Indian superstar played skillfully by Naseeruddin Shah. And romance she does.
Suryakant: “Shayad tumne magazines mein pada nahi hoga, meri ‘tuning’ 500 ladkiyon ke saath ho chuki hai.
Reshma: “Lekin kya aapki ek hi ladki ke saath 500 baar ‘tuning’ hui hai kya?
That’s how Reshma tranforms into ‘Silk’, a bombastic item girl who shows off her voluptous body in item songs. Oozing of sex and mischief, Silk sure makes everyone go crazy – with cash registers going off the hooks, producers love her. With sleazy scenes coming in, respectable filmmakers such as ‘Ibrahim’ hate her.
Silk becomes a superstar in her own right.
Which is when the troubles begin. You can’t have fame and happiness at the same time, it seems. Especially if it has been acquired by shedding one’s ‘izzat’ (honour).
#1 – The Dirty Balan
Full of devilry, Vidya Balan has done an astounding job. She has worn the character of ‘Silk’ with a rare confidence. In fact, Vidya is so full of mischief, that you cannot stop smiling and laughing at her outright sexual advances.
Man, Bollywood sure seems to be coming around it’s senses these days, what with raunchy characters such as Reshma a.k.a “Silk” being portrayed by mainstream actors. Over the last 16 years, Vidya Balan has herself grown from a bespectacled, geeky girl in ‘Hum Paanch’ to to a super sexy, jaunty actor with movies such as Ishqiya and now The Dirty Picture!
Her role as Silk will definitely go down in Bollywood history as one of the raunchiest.
#2- The Dirty Dialogues
Rajat Arora’s witty dialogues help The Dirty Picture give us what we expect out of it – “Entertainment, entertainment, and entertainment.”
Silk’s dialogues are laced with sexual innuendos and Vidya Balan has spoken them with the right dose of naughtiness, doing justice to each and every line.
Conclusion
The brilliant characterization and performance of Vidya Balan as ‘Silk’ and Naseeruddin Shah as Suryakant makes up for the average screenplay and story. Though the film in itself was not as engaging as I had expected, it is definitely a film you can watch once!
Dirty Picture Movie review on external websites:
- Unboxed Writers
- Bollywood Life
- Bollyspice
- An innovative audio review (I should totally make one of these!)
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