‘Piku’ Reminds Us Not To Take Sh*t from the Patriarchy
The 2015 film about a widower obsessed with his bowel movements and his headstrong daughter shows us why we shouldn’t care about what society demands of us.
At a party for her aunt Chhobi Maashi, Piku (Deepika Padukone) grabs a glass of wine and tries to prevent her father, Bhaskor Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan), from grabbing one, too. As the two settle into what they think is just a family party, Chhobi Maashi (Moushumi Chatterjee) has other plans: she wants to set up Piku, who co-owns an architecture firm in Delhi, with a suitable guy named Sourab. As she calls him over, Bhaskor refuses to leave the conversation.
“What are you looking for?” Bhaskor asks Sourab. “Just a nice girl,” the prospective groom responds, nonchalantly. Bhaskor counters: “But she’s very moody, like me. And she’s not a virgin. What do you mean by nice? She has her independent business. She is financially independent, sexually independent.” Piku, frustrated, promptly leaves the party.
In director Shoojit Sircar’s Piku (2015), named after the daughter who takes care of her hypochondriac father who can’t stop talking about his bowel movements, audiences get to reckon with fathers who discuss their kids’ sex lives, strong Bengali women who hold their own, and a treatise on societal expectations and why we abide by them. In screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi’s witty hands and with Sircar’s careful vision, the end result is delightful dialogue and an emotional rollercoaster of a story that stands the test of time, years later.