Bollywood Movie Reviews: Bollywood Actress Vidya Balan goes where few have gone before, putting it all out there, literally, for the sake of her art. Pity it’s for a film as unremarkable as ‘The Dirty Picture’.
Vidya Balan in The Dirty Picture
At one point in this movie, her character, a titillating dancing star of the 80s, says there are only three ingredients in a film that can guarantee its success: “Entertainment, entertainment, and entertainment.” It’s a point director Milan Luthria and his writer Rajat Arora seem determined to beat into our heads. For The Dirty Picture seems to have been made specifically to shock you.
All those lured in solely by the promise of skin-show are unlikely to complain. Yet, despite its masala scenes, heavy dialoguebaazi and liberal sexual innuendo, in the final analysis, this film is far from perfect. The Dirty Picture takes an unconventional idea and bakes it in a predictable oven.
What it suffers most from, unfortunately, is lazy writing. With a plot straight out of a Madhur Bhandarkar film, and a screenplay that follows a familiar graph, The Dirty Picture offers a superficial, simplistic view of the seamy, exploitative side of the 80s film business. There is little attempt to treat this material with sensitivity and depth. No sir, this film unfolds as a series of provocative scenes strung together on the strength of their sexually loaded dialogues.
Despite repeated testimonials on the part of its makers that their inspiration isn’t Silk Smitha, The Dirty Picture still comes across as a thinly-veiled life-story of the famous South Indian screen siren. In typical filmi fashion, the story opens with Reshma, a village girl, running away to Madras to realize her impossible dreams. Reshma is a Plain Jane, but she wants to be a star. Grabbing an opportunity with both hands, Reshma gyrates seductively in her first break before the camera. She acquires the name Silk, falls into an affair with a much-married superstar, and a siren is born. Her downfall, incidentally, is as quick as her rise – Silk’s recklessness makes her overdose on a cocktail of disastrous love affairs, alcohol, bad debts and excess.
