Readers Write In #669: Raking up dirt on Silk Smitha

By Lakshman Sethuraman

The Dirty Picture (TDP) was released on December 2nd , 2011, on Silk Smitha’s birthday. She would have turned 51 on the day if she’d been around. The writers of The Dirty Picture claimed (according to the movie’s Wikipedia entry) that ‘they found little material in magazines of that period, as women like Silk Smitha were often ignored by film magazines, except for gossip column mention’.

How do you write a biopic of an important actress with little information? Mark Antony’s now famous bus fight sequence is one way to do this. And that’s the first tip – if you have material that can only fill five minutes (real name Vijayalakshmi, shy in real life, seductive voice, sparks off a strong reaction in the opposite sex, large eyes) then make a five minute scene out of it, not a full length feature film. Because if you fill in the missing pieces to make a cogent script, you take the risk of these very pieces revealing your own mentality.

A woman who runs away from a bad marriage, aspires to be an actress, gets typecast in non-serious sensual/vamp roles and commits suicide – this basic real life chronology is retained in the movie. Let’s look at what the makers filled in and you’ll see why they were lucky she was dead when it released.

This is Smitha in a Filmfare interview in 1984 ‘Well, actually I wanted to become a character actress like Savithri, Sujata and Saritha. But in my second film ‘Vandichakram’ (her first film in Tamil), I was put in a glamour role. It was in that film that I played the character called ‘Silk’ Smitha (Laughs). It was actually a very good role and people liked my performance. It led to more and more glamour roles. I cannot afford to displease my producers and directors so I continue to accept them. But my ambition remains the same. To become a good character artist like in ‘Alaigal Oivathillai’, which was a hit. But somehow I continue to get more glamour roles.’

This was early days yet for her in the industry. This was her mindset at the beginning of her career – she must have gone on to be consumed by numerous glamour roles over the years, and grown to build her life around the roles she was getting, not the ones she wanted, accepting her limitations. Any biopic, not even a glowing tribute, just a factual one, would choose to show this as a character arc. The makers of TDP ignore this entirely and choose to portray Smitha as a manipulative starlet right at the outset, willing to go to any length to get movies, cynical about serious roles and serious films, all this even before she faces the camera for the first time. She even plans to sleep with a leading man before even trying to get into the movies. According to TDP, there are no circumstances forcing Smitha (her hunger and poverty occupy roughly 3 minutes of screen time) – her choice of roles is just her natural inner cunning grabbing every available opportunity for fame and fortune. She does not undergo a transformation in TDP – just a climactic breakdown in the last 5 minutes.

In TDP, Smitha is shown to be in real life exactly as she is on the screen. Her gestures, expressions, actions are the same. She seduces Suryakanth in a film. She seduces him in real life. She dances and moves seductively in a shoot, does exactly the same thing on the road outside a party she hopes to disrupt. She does seductive dance moves on screen – repeats the same at a party to out dance her competition. For denser members of the audience who still don’t get that she is a vamp in real life, there are minor hints generously strewn about – her living room is designed exactly like a bar, she is never without a cigarette or a drink for most of the second half. At first glimpse this does not appear odd because perhaps, the audience knows so little about Smitha – the person. But there is still a certain ridiculousness in this creative choice of seamlessly playing a person and an actor alternately in exactly the same way. Let’s say we know very little about Amjad Ali Khan the person – imagine an Amjad Ali Khan biopic where Khan is shown shooting for a film and then in the next scene, murders three movie directors for real because they edited out his scenes or something like that.

There is a searing moral indictment in this choice as well. This is the maker telling us – If Smitha has chosen those kind of roles on screen, well, she must not have been a great person off it as well.

Although the major problem with this depiction is denigration of Smitha the person, a minor grouse, relatively, is also denigration of Smitha, the actress. The movie reduces portraying a seductress – for all practical purposes Smitha’s core acting skill – to just wearing revealing clothes and pulling out your tongue. The makers did not care to watch Sadma – just the scenes where she makes Kamal cringe would have served as a lesson in this art – not of seduction, but of portraying seduction believably on screen.

You realise slowly that you aren’t watching a portrayal of a real life, but one of a train wreck. The film progresses through her various disappointments and you know when you see those repeated shots of her weight, her belly and her ill-fitting pants, that it is time. What everyone knows and knew then, was she was suspected to have committed suicide and there was alcohol poisoning there somewhere. Financial distress. Failed relationships. But no, those would not serve as a fitting climax to this tale of an amoral woman. Here’s where the maker sneaks in his own morality in a very specific way. What can be worse than soft porn – well, hard porn of course. The only way Silk can learn a lesson and basically regret her whole life is a realisation that the path she has chosen requires her to be drugged and have real sex on screen as its next logical step. So that she can squirm out, see her past flash before her in conveniently placed mirror or mirror equivalents and well, kill herself. Make no mistake, this film is a moral lesson, one that intends to invoke a collective cringe at what was already a tragic life in reality.

The irony is that the film became an enormous commercial success by adopting the very same method (Smitha’s) that it so condemns throughout – market the lead actress’ ‘bold’ performance, a euphemism for dropping clothes in Smitha’s time that still served TDP well 20 years post. Audiences came, many times, for once able to watch soft porn on the big screen in a mainstream movie and rationalise their guilt later by providing the film generous critical acclaim.