Turn to Page Three. Linger awhile

Celebrities can get away with heinous crimes including sexual rackets involving poor street orphans. Untested entrepreneurs can buy their way to fame (and our wallets) through the services of event management companies and willing or gullible journalists.

Women socialites are unfaithful/promiscuous/sleep their way around. Men are cheats/cuckolds/using their power and wealth to get women (and men) to sleep with them. Hypocrisy is the order of the day. Vulgarity and ostentatious spending is glorified. Everyone is for sale.

Enough to make you sick? Not really. There is a scene in the film of narcotics being consumed at a private bash. Deals are struck in dark corners. Eyes dull over and bodies sway hazily. It is interesting how similar the world of more public partying depicted in the rest of the film is to this trance-like state. The pounding music, the mandatory cocktails, the dim lights, the ubiquitous finery, the round of familiar faces, the inane conversation and above all, the relentless gaze of the media are shown to be more hypnotic and addictive than any drug.

So hypnotic in fact that it cannot be questioned. Or challenged. Or removed. The concept of Page Three in the film is a staggeringly strong entity, so seemingly unassailable that all we are offered are strategies of managing addiction. One is from the gossipy writer- observer. Is she in or is she out? Another is suggested by the brazen choices of the airhostess and the actress. Yet another is the newspaper editor, compromising with a mild effort at doing the right thing. Then there is the crime reporter and daredevil cop doing their hardest, or so they believe, “within the system”. And then there is the main character finally settling for resignation.

In your 20s some people make you angry; in your 30s they make you hurt; at 40 you may just feel apathy; but if you live long enough you see the larger picture and are amused, said Nina Arora, the film’s writer in an interview to Mid-day recently.

Perhaps this a realistic assessment. Perhaps the forces that make Page Three a reality — the marketing industry, media barons, a consumerist audience and the very human weakness for glamour — are too powerful to be taken head on. Perhaps a recognition of absurdity is the only sensible response. At the same time, there is the niggling suspicion that one of the reasons why the film, while exposing, in a creditably credible and engaging manner, the underbelly of the Page Three phenomenon, fails to take a more confrontationist stand is because those involved in its making, like the allegedly fascinated consumers of the Page Three culture, are not entirely free of its attractions.

There is the odd fact of Bhandarkar being involved in a scandal eerily similar to one in the film. Then Arora points out the irony of a party being held to celebrate the film’s success that gave her “the surreal feeling as if I had walked into a party scene from the film”. When the cake was cut and the champagne opened — she goes on to say — the crew, the stars, the producer, the distributor were called and flashbulbs popped, while “I the writer quietly watched from the shadows”. A telling comment on priorities. But even more paradoxical is the matter of well-known socialites playing characters meant to disparage their peers without the least hint of self consciousness and then, at least in one case, writing articles praising the film and the party life all in one breath.

The approach then, is unsettlingly ambiguous, like that of a person who, having given a lecture on the ill effects of smoking, puts away a cigarette in his pocket intact, just in case the urge strikes later.

The real unraveling will have to wait for sterner stuff.