Paa

The good old filmi tearjerker is back and progeria is only the excuse. But Vidya Balan’s eyes make it all worth it.

Paa is a tearjerker par excellence. It is a good, old fashioned ‘Y’ chromosome Hindi melodrama—son discovers father, father son and tear ducts are in overdrive. It would be an error to think that progeria, a condition of premature ageing, is the central issue in Paa, just as it would have been wrong to think that physical disability was at the heart of the film Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black, some years ago. These are but vehicles for an approach to cinema that is exploitative.

Vidya (Vidya Balan) meets Amol (Abhishek) at Cambridge and they have a brief encounter. It leads to pregnancy, but education and career are his priorities and he tells her to abort. She is wounded by his clinical attitude and refuses. He never updates himself on her, goes back to India and joins the family business (politics).

Through a series of contrived situations 13 years later, Amol gets to know that he has a son with disability, and this cut-and-dried politician is suddenly all eager beaver to risk his career in public life to say ‘beta’ and hear ‘paa’ in response. For a courageous decision of this kind to seem believable, Amol would have had to display some sort of previous sensitivity and feeling. But his character, up to this point, is brusque and superficial.

But Paa, of course, is about the man with the mask and you can say with conviction that the prosthetic makeup of little Auro (Amitabh) really turns him into one hell of an ugly blighter. And it’s a month past Halloween!

But it is Vidya Balan who is really wonderful in Paa. This drop dead beautiful actress is exquisite as the mother of a child with a limited lifespan. Her eyes speak and you see her look at her son, recognise his mortality and compare it to her own. She is emotionally devastated but never lets her child see it.

Basically there are two reactions to Paa, both of them cultural. In a scene towards the end of the film when Vidya and Amol clasp hands and walk seven times around Auro’s hospital bed to solemnise their relationship for the boy’s sake, half the audience is all choked up. The rest, cynical bastards, are home and dry.

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Ajit Duara