‘Page 3’ has its moments

IN Opinion | 03/02/2005

 FILM REVIEW: PAGE 3                               

Within the profession we have been bitching about Page 3 and what it represents for years, only to have more publications rush to cash in on the popularity of the phenomenon.  In Pakistan Najim Sethi and wife, publishers of the Friday Times,  have just launched a magazine called Good Times which simply gives readers a whole lot of  page 3. It represents the triumph of PR over journalism, and the dismaying advent of  procured coverage,  but newspapers offer it because there is a market for it. It is an incestuous ritual that some journalists are happy to be part of.

But to Madhur Bhandarkar who uses cinema to explore society’s underbelly, Page 3 celebrates a world which has a rotten core. Part caricature, part heavy-handed social critique, part reality cinema (if you permit the coinage) he has turned out a film that suddenly makes the  Page 3  crowd seem despicable when we thought they were just vain and shallow. What saves it from being over the top is the characters he puts at the centre of his unsparing critique. They are credible, nuanced, and essayed with finesse. Without Konkana Sen Sharma as the page three reporter, and Boman Irani as her pragmatic editor the movie would have flopped. They save it from its excesses. 

Page 3 evokes a social circuit replete with party animals, fake smiles, glitzy clothes, and journalists picking up sound bites. It turns the NRI who can buy his way into the society pages into a ludicrous performing animal. Strung together between the ‘happening’ events are the lives of three young women with varied aspirations—an air hostess weary of the grind and in search of a rich husband, a starlet who wants a break and a Page 3 journalist. Their bonding in a tiny surburban flat is heart-warmingly evoked.

Bhandarkar also delves beneath the façade of the rich and famous to expose child abuse, alienation from their own children, the hunger for publicity, the sadness behind the gossamer. Page 3 provides a peek into what ails society when priorities falter—when being seen is more important than relationships, where integrity succumbs to power. It does so through the eyes of a journalist who both belongs to that circle and does not, who goes from refusing to be judgmental to rushing to expose its sickness without a thought for the consequences. It also uses a bunch of gossiping drivers—delightfully essayed---to expose the hollowness of society relationships.

In some places, Bhandarkar pushes too much—the funeral scene is overdone. Gayatri (Tara Sharma) leaving town to escaping the compromises being thrust on her and then suddenly plunging back willingly into the sleaze is not credible. And as for the secret sodomisers, in the shape of industrialist Thapar and his foreign partners, we did not know child abuse was a group activity. A nice touch is the police officer being called a "bloody ghati" by a pot-smoking rich kid. He informs her that he did English honours from Fergusson College before shoving her into the police van.

As a comment on contemporary media Page 3  is equivocal. There are good guys, falliable guys (and gals) and proprietors who are both ruthless and compromised because they do not want to lose advertising.  At the end it offers a one-liner for the idealistic from the crime reporter played by Atul Kulkarni in another piece of perfect casting. You have to learn when and how to do exposes, he tells Madhavi Sharma, the page-three-reporter-turned-reporter-with-a-conscience who loses her job.

Sevanti Ninan