Picture copyrights and courtesy: MSM motion pictures / Yash Raj Films

Venue: PVR Plaza, Connaught Place
Date: 14 May 2015

The cat is out of the bag. The whole nation is talking about the Bengali obsession with food and its digestion.

Piku is a endearing story revolving around Piku (Deepika Padukone), an urban young Delhi girl of Bengali descent and her dyspeptic father (Amitabh Bacchhan). They embark on a road trip to Kolkata when they are driven by Rana (Irrfan Khan), owner of a car rental company. The main characters as well as the supporting cast that had yesteryear’s beauty Mausami Chatterji, Raghuvir Yadav, Jishu and Swaroopa Ghosh (Vicky Donor fame) did full justice to their roles.

Director Shoojit Sircar drew deep into his Bengali roots and managed to capture the sentiments of the middle class to upper middle class strata of this community. Swaroopa Ghosh assaying the role of a middle aged married Bengali woman donned a quintessential “nighty” as is a common sight in a Bengali household. Moreover, the snobbery of the Bengalis towards the Hindi belt was quite evident when Amitabh came to know that Irrfan Khan aka Rana Chowdhary was not a Bengali but a UP-ite. That said, the characters did not get typecast in any regional boundary and exuded a global flavour. Single urban people who are trying to balance their work and family life along with their physical and emotional needs in any where in the world can very well relate to characters of Piku and Rana. While we did not find elements that would make us roar with laughter, we fund ourselves smiling/grinning frequently.

Although light hearted and very suitable for a weekend watch, the film has infusions of various adult concepts like sex out of marriage or live-in relationships. Overall it’s an extremely well made film on a new theme that does not claim to be arty but is going all guns in the commercial arena. In fact two hoots to the intellect, the cuteness of all the characters makes it a new age romantic film.

The film ends on an open note and so resonates the lives of many single men and women today.

Notwithstanding the fact that the film, every five minutes has something to do with excretion, it is one of the cleanest (and coolest) films we have seen in recent times.