SOCIETY
Page Three syndrome
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It is stunning to see Mumbai's beautiful people turned in the space of two hours into ugly, pock marked individuals. AJIT DUARA comments on `Page 3', a satire on Mumbai's party world.
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SHASHI ASHIWAL
The film takes you straight into the world of the upper crust.
WHEN a people are able to mock the cream of their society and when no censorship affects the laughter that this satire produces, we are free. "Page 3" is a liberating movie because it allows us to unleash our venom at the sheer fluff of empty-headed hedonism that consumerism creates. There are no winners in this film, only losers. It is stunning to see Mumbai's beautiful people turned in the space of two hours into ugly, pock marked, uncouth vulgarians. The party people, desperate to form an alliance with a section of the media that sells the vacuum in their minds as gold, are betrayed by their own party poopers.
Director Madhu Bhandarkar's party pooping "research" methodology was simple. He went to Mumbai's parties — the ones that page 3 columnists and photographers were paid to attend, the ones about which prominent pictures in the next morning's city supplement have to be bought. Soon he was figuring out the shifting equations; the power principles of publicity, the unwritten code between a beautiful socialite and a middle class journalist, and above all, the determination of the newspaper's reader as the lowest common denominator of sales and of taste.
Cultural criticism in the limelight
No one is spared. We the readers, the consumers of page 3, we the audience, the watchers of the movie "Page 3", we the media, with the couldn't care less attitude to what is sacred in the free press, a press that we have nurtured for 60-odd years of our independence to keep free. At the end of the movie you sit and watch the credits, sick to the pit of your stomach at the cultural nadir to which we, the public, have reached.
This is the function of good satire and it is, in the end, another media, the cinema, which we have also struggled to keep free these 60 odd years that has brought you this nauseous self-appraisal by Bhandarkar, a filmmaker himself the victim of the page 3 sub-culture not too long ago. Cultural criticism, in the form of perceptive book reviewers, iconoclastic art and theatre critics and honest film reviewers, provide the mirror to society in a consumer society. They keep us sane, safe from our own excesses, and what the page 3 syndrome has done in the past decade is to delete these critics completely from our cultural programming.
The movie "Page 3", and more vitally, the commercial success of this film, is dramatically important because it brings back cultural criticism to centre stage. It takes a page 1 look at page 3 and dismisses it as the bunch of whopping lies it is.
Straight into the party world
The film has no ostensible centre. It takes you straight into the party world, where party boys and girls, some played by actual Mumbai party people who may or may not have quite known how the film would be edited when they were explained the characters they are to play. So they end up playing themselves, which is perfectly in character, and can be loosely described as good acting. The peg that holds the movie together is a page 3 journalist, played by the now ubiquitous though effective Konkana Sen Sharma. She drifts through beautiful people, at times so completely seduced by this world that she thinks of herself as one. Dressing in the best she can afford, eating and drinking party fare, getting herself an appropriate male model as boyfriend, sympathising with the odd gay make-up man at the party, she liberates herself from the Indian middle class. No longer petty bourgeois, she can take the party world seriously.
But reality occasionally cuts in. It is on the local train home, in the crummy apartment in the distant suburbs she shares with two other bachelor girls (Sandhya Mridul and Tara Sharma). The room mates are feisty girls with aspirations that are mind numbingly cynical — both look to hook rich men, based on a policy decision that says money scores over everything else in Mumbai city. Reality is also the office where page 3 is more important than the crime beat but not more important than the business section. At the crime desk is a down to earth reporter (Atul Kulkarni) and at the office is the Editor, a good man compromised (Boman Irani). The real world is comparatively dull.
The movie structures a universe that is seamless between lifestyle and profession, where you have to take the world of entertainment very seriously in order to succeed, where if you miss a nuance of the artificiality that holds this world together you slip. This, in short, is about a publication, which makes no distinction between editorial and advertising, and a newspaper where a reporter who cannot grasp this equation is "naοve". In some ways it is like Dante's "Inferno".
At the same time, when you get to the end of the movie "Page 3", you feel that we have finally turned the corner. The nausea that the film produces has bile, but it also has confidence, self-belief and a certain optimism. If a film maker can rip up the facade of the top end of our society so ruthlessly, so effectively and so aesthetically and be applauded and not censured for it, perhaps we are really free.
Robert Altman's "The Player" (1992) tore into the Hollywood system and exposed the hypocrisy of big players in American entertainment. Michael Moore in "Fahrenheit 9/11" (2004) ripped open the alliance between the military industrial complex, oil and construction conglomerates and media houses in the post-9/11 U.S.
Of course, "Page 3" takes a much smaller subject in scale and volume, the Mumbai upper crust, but does as skillful a job of satirical exposure. The making and distribution of such a film in India, particularly in the context of the contemporary entertainment world of Hindi cinema, is a heartening and positive sign of a free and mature society.
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