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Madhur Bhandarkar's film reveals what goes on behind the gloss and glamour with such gloss and glamour that it inadvertently ends up glorifying the very ethos it sets out to critique
Directed by Madhur Bhandarkar
Produced by Bobby Pushkarna
English/Hindi, 2004  It’s about time it happened. An expose of the glitterati who fluff the pages of our dailies. Of their shallow preoccupations and single-minded pursuit of money, style and celebrity status.
In Page 3Madhur Bhandarkar infiltrates this set via a journalist, Madhavi Sharma (Konkona Sen) assigned to cover the socialite beat. She gets invited to parties, kisses air around cheeks like other guests, gets privileged interviews, and becomes so popular that the number of pages covering socialite events in her newspaper are increased. Then comes her touchdown with reality. An aspiring starlet she befriends puking on a late night local, meets her at a party again. Madhavi puts her in touch with a star who promises her a break in films but gets her pregnant instead. An attempted suicide and miscarriage later she returns to her family in Delhi . Madhavi questions her priorities, gets herself transferred to the crime beat. Predictable? The script is replete with such clichés. The aspiring airhostess plotting to land a catch, the socialite involved in social work, infidelities, wheels-within-deals. But through these cliches Bhandarkar cracks the masks that make the rich-and-famous objects of envy. For that he deserves credit. Among Madhavi’s acquaintances is a notorious party animal donating generously to his wife’s voluntary organisation for impoverished children. A tip-off from an informer on the crime beat leads Madhavi to discovering him en flagrante in an orgy with the same kids. He pulls out all stops to cover up the scandal. She loses her job for straying into territories best left untouched. The wife commits suicide, the party-crazy daughter converts to a social worker but the husband’s obsession for parties remains compulsive. Madhavi lands a job with another paper and runs into him at another party. The starlet who’d returned to Delhi is also back unfazed. The film ends with a disillusioned Madhavi declaring that for her the party is over. Behind her the revelry continues, subtly suggesting that everything goes when money flows The problem with Bhandarkar’s critique is that it stops short of analysis. It fails to recognise that Page 3 epitomises the apex of marketing forces where the people featured become role models for the common man, urging him to buy more, spend more, to reach the ‘pinnacle of success’ solely by looking glamorous, spouting clever lines and being at the right place at the right time. The Page 3 set does not represent a clash between Western and Indian culture/values as suggested by a cop in the film. In fact it represents an unconditional celebration of greed, and a complete camouflage of its cancerous roots. With ‘attitude’ as the catchword, arrogance, insolence and insensitivity are pushed as desirable traits. Readers fed on Page 3 trivia lap up gossip as news, lose their capacity to differentiate style from content, chaff from grain. They become marionettes mindlessly imitating puppets promoted as celebs. None of this is exposed. Instead the film reveals what goes on behind the gloss and glamour with such gloss and glamour as to inadvertently end up glorifying the very ethos it sets out to critique. --Meher Pestonji (Meher Pestonji is a writer and journalist based in Mumbai.) InfoChange News & Features, March 2005
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