Padman Review - A "Period" of Ennui

With Padman, Akshay Kumar re-iterates that he may be the biggest non-Salman Khan bhai ever. His film, painfully similar to last year’s Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (also starring Kumar), is directed by R. Balki, a director known to come up with crackling plots that run out of steam quickly. Akshay is yet again the self righteous fool who tries to make his village realize the misogyny and sexism in their everyday lives. Here, he’s in another film in a rural setting, where Lakshmi (Kumar) lives with his wife, Gayatri (Radhika Apte). Whenever it’s her time of the the month, Gayatri uses dirty rags and sleeps outside, stating that her living inside during this period would be ‘apavitra (impure)’. Of course, our ‘pavitra (pure)’ Lakshmi immediately objects. What follows is Balki’s 2 hour 20 minute long ode to Akshay Kumar.

Here again, the hues of Toilet paint Balki’s canvas. The unreasonable wife, and the tenaciously loyal Kumar who perseveres and ultimately, shows his wife how wrong she was (don’t say this is a spoiler, you know it was coming). Based on the life of Arunachalam Murugananthamm, and blandly adapted by Twinkle Khanna in her book, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, Padman takes an inspiring story and makes a banal and uninspired product. Perhaps, the problem lies in the titular character. Lakshmi, who starts off as a likable man, ends up being a screechy, annoyed protagonist, who you simply don’t want to root for anymore. Kumar plays him in the most monotonous fashion, with the occasional feminist cry and angry screams.

He’s declared a pervert by the village and forced into isolation. There’s a ridiculous middle portion in the film (Balki’s films always have these - the Amitabh-Jaya cameo in Ki & Ka, the car accident in Shamitabh, etc.) where Lakshmi starts working as house-help in a professor’s house. I know that parts of the film have been taken from Murugananthamm’s life, including an incident with pig blood. But, whatever Balki makes himself, is tedious and quite frankly, boring. The biggest example to support that argument is the problematic Sonam Kapoor, playing Pari. Kapoor has evolved as an actor, and I have to say that she played this part with the charm that I wouldn’t have expected from her.

Still, the dialogues don’t help her. There’s an awkward kiss scene thrown into the mix, shot in slow motion (almost as if a film about periods is scared to show a kiss?) conveniently hiding anything that could ‘hurt’ the sentiments of the millions of pure and holy vegetarian vegan PETA-supporting Indians who’ve come to see the film and not objectify women. Sonam’s character belongs in a commercially made, terrible Imtiaz Ali film. Her Pari, a ‘master Tabla player’ has as much depth as the board from which the cotton for the pads is made. Speaking of that, the conflicts in Padman, are much too many and too easily solved. “A 6000 crore company,” is what Lakshmi gleefully declares to a US worker in a big company, who sends over large shipments of Cellulose Fiber Cotton.

Like other Balki films, there’s an Amitabh Bachchan cameo, with the most cliched speech I have heard and the most absurd way to put an actor in a film, ever since the VFX-ed Bill Gates from Half Girlfriend which still haunts my nightmares. As Padman goes on, the film becomes more and more unbearable and unbelievable. Balki’s biggest problems from his previous films are here too. He’s a talented director, but again, he’s overindulgent and explains each and every emotion either with tight close-ups or terribly written voice-overs for Akshay. To sum it up, Padman is terribly written by Balki and co-written by Swanand Kirkire and the camera-angles are odd, to say the least (Balki learned from the Ram-Gopal-Varma School of Shooting?) and cinematographer PC Sreeram fails in his job. The only thing that works for Padman is Radhika Apte. While her sobs occasionally get jarring and she is too hobbled with weird dialogues (Hum aurat ke liye bimari se marna, sharm se jine se behetar hain. (For us women, dying of sickness is better than living with shame.)), Apte powers through with her powerhouse performance that owns the film.

I wish we had gotten another film. I wish Padman wasn’t a masqueraded misogynistic affair pretending to be the feminist cry of the century. I wish Padman had been the more interesting story of Lakshmi’s wife’s dynamics with not only her husband, her entire village or her family, but most importantly with herself. I wish Balki had taken a different approach to Murugananthamm’s inspiring story. And I sincerely hope that someone tells his unusual tale in a better and more wholesome way. I’m going with 2 out of 5 for Padman - one star is for Apte.