A case for new sermons

The protests against PK only strengthen the case for preachy actors

One of the most enjoyable YouTube videos I have seen recently is a "pretentious movie review" - on the humour channel run by Kanan Gill - of the 1990 film Tum Mere Ho, in which Aamir Khan played a snake-charmer. The wisecracks in the review, hilarious as they were, played second fiddle to the clips from the film itself, which were a throwback to one of mainstream Hindi cinema's most embarrassing decades. They also provided a glimpse of a very different Aamir from the one we know today. Here he is, dressed in an outlandish gypsy costume, mouthing dialogues like "Kaategi kya?" with a straight face (while "taming" a fiery young girl) and nodding approvingly during a scene where an elderly clansman explains their time-honoured "custom" of young men abducting random women just for fun.

It would be a mistake to hold Tum Mere Ho up as a representative Aamir film of the time - his choice of roles was usually more discerning even in those tacky years - but there has been a marked shift in his screen persona between then and now. The difference is as pronounced as the difference between the Chetan Bhagat of 2003 - the young banker settling down unselfconsciously to write a novel because he wanted to tell a story - and the Bhagat who now writes with a self-professed agenda to make a difference, to inspire youngsters who are trying to make it in an Anglophone world.

A star of Aamir's stature can take over a project, bending it to his image or his vision, and in the last few years, in major films like 3 Idiots and Taare Zameen Par, he has often played the oracle who stands at a remove from us ordinary mortals and supplies necessary sermons and life-lessons. But watching the first half of Rajkumar Hirani's PK - with Aamir as the titular extraterrestrial learning about our strange ways - was a reminder that this actor still knows how to have fun on screen, and can do wacky stuff very well when he is in the mood for it. This is one of his most engaging performances in a while, one where the bucolic accent (PK learns human language by "transmitting" from a woman who happens to be a Bhojpuri speaker) complements the rest of the wide-eyed performance perfectly instead of coming across as an "actorly" affectation. And the film's first half has some lovely things in it: the familiar is made very unfamiliar, providing a fresh look at things we take for granted (so that you may end
up asking 'what really IS so strange about a man pairing a formal shirt with a flouncy skirt?'). For PK, everything has to be learnt from scratch, and his childlike (mistaken as drunken or "peekay") perspective on our vulnerable little world - our pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan put it - drives this part of the film.

Unfortunately, the whimsical, montage-like tone is not sustained, and those early scenes are followed by the pedantry one has more typically associated with Aamir in the past few years. The second half is mainly a critique of organised religion and the charlatans who profit from it, which in itself is a worthy endeavour - but the film becomes overcooked in the process. The climactic scene, in which a "Godman" is exposed during a Live TV show, was one of the most tedious and stretched out sequences I have seen in a while: too many trite revelations, too many reaction shots. It sucks the energy out of the film by treating the audience as children who need to be spoon-fed their medicine.

Or at least that's what I thought at the time. Recent developments - the demands for the banning of the film by pea-brained religious groups who claim their sentiments have been offended by scenes such as the one where an actor playing Lord Shiva is accosted in the men's toilet - have forced a rethink. If PK felt like it had to discard subtleties and turn into a public-service show because the audience was likely to be full of dolts, well, maybe there is something to that cynical view. There's a scene where the alien tells the Godman, sarcasm dripping from his voice, that the all-powerful Creator of the Universe is capable of looking after Himself, He doesn't need his devotees to "protect" him. For most intelligent people, this should be an easy enough idea to understand, but it's a lesson all those taking up cudgels on behalf of their threatened deities are unwilling to learn. Perhaps we do need preachy actors - and preachy extraterrestrials - after all.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer