Every once in a way you decide that enough is enough and go for a confrontation, however ugly it may be. Years ago in Delhi, as a greenhorn in journalism, I decided to take an auto driver with a faulty meter and uber-rude ways to the Lodi Road police station. I should have sensed that something was amiss when he willingly drove me there to file a complaint against him. The 10 minutes inside the station became a protracted nightmare with the cops, women included, ganging up with him against me, calling me names, playing mind games of the worst kind. I still can’t figure out how they manipulated, turned the tide against me and made me into a wrongdoer out to harm a “poor” driver. I filed the complaint but found myself stepping out, trembling in both fear and rage, knowing they would all be laughing behind my back. Who knows, the auto might have been registered under a cop’s name, said close friends.
Why start a film review by narrating what is clearly a personal story? The connection lies in drawing attention to what appeals the most about Pink: its compelling portrayal of a system complicit with the influential in badgering the innocent is something we would all have seen, heard of or experienced closely at some point in time and can empathise with. Only the degree of harassment varies. It gets more skewed when a woman is at the receiving end.
In Pink, the focus is on the ordeal of three single girls, Meenal Arora ( Taapsee Pannu) , Falak Ali ( Kriti Kulhari) and Andrea ( Andrea Tariang) , whose night out at a rock concert sets off a terrifying chain of events. Their frightful experience gets cleverly sandwiched between the blank opening credits and the final explicatory visuals of the closing credits; it’s all about things coming a full circle for the threesome.
