What To Watch On Netflix: Piku
Some white people would have you believe that they are the only ones capable of being the protagonists of quirky, heartfelt family comedies. Little Miss Sunshine, The Squid and the Whale, Rushmore, Juno: they're all films that depict the absurdity and wistfulness and love found in modern, unconventional families, and they're all chock full of white people. While I’m sure it’s not their intent, it sets up the thinking that only white people take weird road trips or have charming idiosyncrasies, that they’re the only ones whose lives are lived in such detail.
Piku, a 2015 Indian film currently on Netflix, is a similar type of comedy. It stars Deepika Padukone as Piku, a single woman who lives with her father, Bhashkor (played by the icon Amitabh Bachchan), an elderly widower who will not stop complaining about his bowels. Piku is irritable and stubborn, qualities made worse by her father’s hypochondria and his ideas about how she should live her life. He says marriage is for stupid people and that women should live their own lives, only to call Piku multiple times a day at work with updates about his digestive system.
At one point, Bhashkor has a real health scare, and suddenly becomes concerned about the state of his ancestral home in Kolkata, which Piku wants to sell. So there's a road trip, helmed by Rana (Irrfan Khan), the owner of the local cab company and the only driver willing to put up with Piku, who has thoroughly terrified the rest of the staff over the years.
Piku has everything you want in this style of comedy. There’s romantic tension between Piku and Rana as they slowly reveal the details of their lives to each other while the rest of the car sleeps. There’s an old man yelling things like “Western culture is not the benchmark of progress, got it!” from the backseat. There’s Rana drawing a diagram of the way the human body passes shit in an effort to convince Bhashkor to squat when he goes to the bathroom.
And yet, it also defies expectations. The sappy moments don’t quite go the way you expect them to. The ending looks different than you may have convinced yourself it would. And that’s largely because the characters are allowed to remain themselves. The road trip doesn’t fix everyone’s life, doesn’t open them up to every new experience. It changes them, sure, but only a little. Because no matter what the movies say, there’s no way a road trip makes you realize all your faults and shortcomings and immediately turn them around.
Piku doesn’t have any white people in it. That’s because it was made in India, not because they were trying to make a point about representation, but in America, it serves as a reminder that white people don’t have to dominate indie comedies. I don’t think I realized I hadn’t seen a movie like this that didn’t star white people (save for the recent The Long Dumb Road) until I watched Piku. Even as a non-white person, I had absorbed that that’s just who gets to have these movies made about them.
I’m often reluctant to step into conversations about representation in media. I know it’s important, but sometimes I think people treat it like it’ll solve more than it will. Yes, we should be seeing more types of people as protagonists, but as a mixed race person, I quickly found it fruitless to assume I would 1) see a person with a white mother and an Indian father on screen and 2) that, if that happened, this character’s life or experiences would in any way resemble mine. Too often the conversation around representation focuses on “seeing yourself,” which can only go so far.
But where representation matters is in other people seeing themselves in characters that don’t resemble them. I didn’t see myself in Piku (though, as someone of Bengali heritage with a lot of digestive issues, I saw my future in Bhashkor). But I want a white person to resonate with a prickly, combative woman who loves her father despite how much he drives her crazy. I want someone to see themself in the cab driver with the demanding family and the kind eyes. I want this family to be as relatable and understood as the family in Little Miss Sunshine, because there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.
