The characters are all played by brilliantly self-effacing 'actors' (are they really actors?), so much so that you wish the known faces , seasoned and brilliant as they are, like Naseeruddin Shah and Raghuvir Yadav would not come into the docu-drama content of this ode to the wretched and the damned.
To most of us out here sitting in the auditorium, farmers' suicide is just a headline. Read, regretted and then put to bed. Peepli Live is that savagely raw and hurtful wake-up call for the conscience which does not mince words. Yes it has very funny moments when death becomes a laughing raw-stock for the television camera. But Peepli Live is not a funny film. Not really.
The dialogues are not what you will hear in the inner chambers of a fashion show. The words don't seem written. They just seem to come to the two brothers Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav) and Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) as they walk the slushy muddy paths of a village that seems to exist outside camera range.
To Raghuvir Yadav's credit, he blends into the symphony of anonymity as well as the screen Natha, though Yadav is of course a well-known actor.
In a sequence written with the taang firmly away from the shriek, between them the two brothers choose Natha for the suicide that would bring some financial succour to the impoverished family. There begins the circus of the self-serving. Politicians are of course brutally satirized by the script. And you wonder, is it really the politicians to blame for the condition of the Nathas in our part of the world?
It's the electronic media that comes for the most ruthless reprimand from the script. The journalists played by actors who seem to be wedded to the tyranny of the TRPs are all so splendid in their news-hound roles you wonder which came first the news-bytes or this film about biting into the byte!
Peepli Live is shot by cinematographer Shanker Raman in stern solid colours connected to Mother Earth. We can't say the camera is unobtrusive. But this film is about the infinitely intrusive nature of the camera…right?
Should one comment on the quality of the performances in a film where 'acting' is not an assumed conceit? The 'actors' all uniformly blend into the fertile earthy fabric of this homage to the grass root.
But a special word for that extra-special actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui. He is the only character with a conscience in this film populated with merciless opportunists. The means to survival is to be among the fittest. Anusha Rizvi is an astonishing addition to the repertoire of directorial forces that matter.
By making her first film on those who don't matter beyond a random survey during the electoral consensus she has proved that the conscience as a cinematic commodity still survives.
Protests starts against ‘Peepli [Live]
Though the movie has been well received by the critics and also by the audience, it seems not everyone’s pleased with Peepli [Live] which is a satiric attempt to show the real rural India. A certain group of farmers in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra have objected to the depiction of peasants in the Aamir Khan production.
Yavatmal, a place in Vidarbha, has witnessed several farmer suicides in the past and the villagers think that the Anusha Rizvi directed Peepli [Live] is far from reality and that the movie is an insult to the poor farmers who make a tough living. So, they all gathered and protested on streets, even burnt an effigy of Aamir Khan, and demanded an urgent ban on the movie.
The protests led by the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti will continue, says its president Kishore Tiwari. In a press release he is quoted as saying, “It is an insult to poor farmers of Vidarbha who have been victims of globalisation and wrong policies of the state. We will not tolerate further as this movie revolves around a debt ridden farmer committing suicide for the sake of compensation, trivialising the issue and is far from reality.” The protesters even condemned Aamir for finalizing the script without consulting the experts.