Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch PK
2014 · Rajkumar Hirani · PK on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Khan's eyes while somebody explains something to him. (performance)
The stare is held past the point of comedy, helped by prosthetic ears and specialist contact lenses worn on the body rather than added later. The gait, the head tilt, and the flat delivery are built to match.
Payoff: The construction never winks at you. It is closer to silent comedy than naturalism, and it refuses to ask for sympathy.
Look at where PK's clothes come from. (setting)
He takes them from parked cars while the couples inside are otherwise occupied, so the outfit is a patchwork assembled out of other people's discarded layers. He wears it for most of the film.
Payoff: He walks through the story literally dressed in other people's love, and the costume is making that point long before anyone says it.
Listen to the rural dialect coming out of him. (sound)
PK picks up Bhojpuri, a rural eastern vernacular, and then speaks it in Delhi for the rest of the picture. The mismatch between the speaker and the speech never resolves.
Payoff: It marks him as an outsider from inside the country rather than from abroad, which changes who the satire is aimed at.
Look at how bright and saturated Delhi looks. (light)
C. K. Muraleedharan shoots high-key and warm, with the city rendered dense and crowded. The only passage of real austerity is the desert prologue, a figure against sand and sky in wide shot.
Payoff: The look keeps every gag legible and the ensemble readable, which is what lets the film carry an argument at comedy pace.
Notice the small details the film sets up early. (structure)
Hirani edits his own films and builds them out of setup-and-payoff chains laid down long before they are cashed. Running gags accumulate rather than repeat, and the whole thing sits inside PK telling his story to Jaggu.
Payoff: Almost nothing here is incidental. What looks like a throwaway in the first hour is usually load-bearing in the last.
Once you have seen it
Notice how long the film keeps one letter from you. (structure)
The frame narration lets Hirani withhold a single piece of paper for two hours while the audience draws its own conclusions about the man who wrote it.
Payoff: The payoff works on your own readiness to believe the worst of a Pakistani Muslim character, which is the sharpest thing the film does.
Watch where the final argument takes place. (staging)
Hirani always finishes in a public forum. A radio studio in Lage Raho Munna Bhai, a lecture hall in 3 Idiots, and here a television studio with a mass audience watching it happen.
Payoff: Error has to be corrected in front of witnesses, and the antagonist is given room to change his mind rather than be destroyed.
Watch Saurabh Shukla play the godman as reasonable. (performance)
Tapasvi is not written or performed as an obvious fraud. Shukla gives him intelligence, self-possession, and the manner of a successful businessman who believes his own operation.
Payoff: Because he is credible, the ending has to be an argument rather than an unmasking, and the film has to actually win it.
Count how many times you actually see the spaceship. (setting)
This is a film whose protagonist is an alien and there is no alien set piece anywhere in it. The ship is glimpsed rather than displayed, and the effects budget is spent on a face and a costume.
Payoff: The science fiction is a device for asking questions, not a spectacle, and the film never lets the premise become the attraction.
Carry this in: Watch the clothes. PK walks through the entire film dressed in other people's love.