Film review: Bollywood’s PK sees alien search for remote control and god
Indian blockbuster examines religions and spiritual crisis, complete with gags and musical numbers
It takes a wise fool to point out the peculiar superstitions accompanying any organised religion, and this entertaining Bollywood musical is so relentlessly buoyant in its charge to ask the big questions it comes close to reaching an epiphany, regardless of its fundamentally superficial propositions.
Named PK (short for Peekay, meaning “tipsy” in Hindi) by random strangers for his seemingly unruly behaviour, the protagonist (played by a bug-eyed Aamir Khan) is really an alien visiting Earth to make contact – only to have his spaceship’s remote control stolen by the first human he encounters.
In a hilarious rite of passage in which PK goes looking for the gem-like gadget, he is repeatedly sent away and told to ask for god’s help, and is thus consequently set on an unlikely course of religion surfing. As the rituals become repetitive and the remote remains unfound, doubt seeps into PK’s mind.
If the director Rajkumar Hirani – whose last directing and co-writing effort was the smash hit 3 Idiots (2009) – had stayed with PK’s search for god the whole time, this film could well have turned out to be one of the more provocatively conceived dramas on spiritual crisis in recent times.
