Paa’s promotions indicated that the film will make a miserable spectacle out of progeria – as Amir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par did of special children for most of the film and Bhansali’s Black did of its blind & deaf protagonists for an entire film. So it is a relief to see that Paa is selling not the disease but a story. It is told with sensitivity and humour that one has come to expect from R.Balki after Cheeni Kum, a film that stands, if at times unsteadily, on its own two feet.
The fear of being forced to shed tears for a 12-year old child dying of accelerated ageing fades as one begins to share his joie de vivre and his views of the world around him. Auro’s disease is rare, but so is his precocious sense of humour. Auro (Amitabh Bachchan) lives with his mother, Vidhya (Vidya Balan) and maternal grandmother (Arundhati Naag) in domestic bliss while his biological father, Amol (Abhishek Bachchan) and his father (Paresh Rawal) are seen fighting intense political battles and living a life under full public glare and scrutiny.
With Auro at the center, the film can be neatly split into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ worlds on his each sides. (It cannot be a coincidence that Amol’s ‘family’ has no women and Vidhya’s has no grown up men.) While the former is associated with colossal ambition, public domain and cynical political activism, the latter is private and full of emotion, nurture, and domesticity. It is the intelligent and sensitive Auro, with his vision of a ‘white globe’, who brings these two worlds together.
We see how the feminine domestic environment has nurtured Auro’s world view into one that is full of humour and acceptance. And this is also a world the director seems most comfortable depicting. By dropping the syrupy, artificial, smothering mother-child depictions in many of our films, Balki has made the treatment far more intelligent and refreshing. Indeed, the mother-daughter and mother-son relationship in Paa is one of the most beautiful in recent Bollywood films.
However, the political/public ‘masculine’ world that Balki creates is shaky, simplistic, dated and unconvincing. There is too much talk, too much naïve earnestness. The long tirade against the media is simply misplaced in this story. In the context of the narrative, it is fitting when media is blamed for its attempt to make a spectacle of Auro, but to stay on media-politicians’ fight is an unnecessary digression and seems out of proportion. Even if it was Balki’s intention of showing a certain sterility in the ‘masculine’ world (as against a fecund & compassionate ‘feminine’ world), Amol-as-the-politician track sticks out like a sore thumb.
Something that further undermines the beauty of the film is its ‘happy ending’. There is nothing wrong in it being happy; Auro bringing the two symbolic worlds together could certainly be a plausible resolution. But all of it is treated too literally with the child putting the parents’ hands onto each other (like those dying spouses & mothers in old films), and the parents taking marriage pheras round their dying child seems taken from the ‘wring-tears-from-your-eyes’ chapter of the ol’ Bollywood rulebook that one had feared at the start and was happy to not see until the climax.
Amitabh Bachchan, Esq. gives a truly rare performance in R. Balki’s Paa. It should be every seasoned actor’s effort to go behind the character and lose his own self in it. It is not Auro’s mask or the make-up alone that Mr Bachchan has used to his advantage. He instead takes one of the biggest risks of his acting career, puts every bit of his talent and experience and meets one of the biggest challenges to come up with a career defining performance. It is Bachchan’s enormously generous and inspired performance (as against hammy and caricatured acts of Black and Eklavya to name just two recent films) that becomes the highlight of the film and actually makes other shortfalls of the film more visible. Indeed, it is because of his father’s brilliant performance that Abhishek’s own act as Paa looks dull and stoic. Vidya Balan is a picture of feminine sensitivity, both in her romance as a student at Cambridge University and as a single mother of a child with progeria. Arundhati Naag’s grandmother act is equally adorable.
Illayaraja background score is fitting though it gives the film a ‘southern accent’ when the film is based in Lucknow. The brilliant cinematographer, PC Sreeram’s work is noteworthy although one felt his ‘icy’ steel touch in the climactic minutes was drawing the blood out of the scenes and could instead have had more warmth and passion.
I wish Balki had stuck more around Auro even if this meant scaling down the film to a world as seen and lived by a 12-year old. In the end, Paa is Bachchan Sr.’s baby. He deserves acting awards in this year’s roll-call. If they get one too many, I’ll happily look away.
(first appeared on Passion for Cinema)
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