There’s the nation’s best-known actor, without his best-known assets: his deep voice, and his deadly presence. Amitabh entirely trades off his screen aura for a child-geriatric Auro. Mainline audiences can’t be used to this. They’re likely to laugh or leave. Surprisingly, they’ll laugh at the intended notes, and leave, quite satisfied actually. Therein lies the film’s grandest achievement.

Behind the fine prosthetic make-up, it’s virtually impossible to recognise Bachchan or his trademark baritone. The actor tempers his voice into an endearing wispy tone with a slight accent, almost as if an inebriated Anthony Gonsalves was dreamily mumbling in his sleep. Coming to Auro, the heart, beat, soul, spice and sweeping factor of this film, he doesn’t need any warming up to. Big B’s Auro wins you over the moment he makes his bouncy entry in the assembly hall to grab a prize for his ‘fluke’ creativity.

Sometimes, films like ‘Paa’ does make Bollywood stand upright with honour. Hats off to filmmaker Balakrishnan!! Amitabh owes a lot to this auteur for delineating his persona with new-fangled dimensions. An ad filmmaker would usually overflow with creative quotients and Balki seems to posses them in excess. The filmmaker surpasses his ‘Paa’ setting asunder with other Hindi films based on various disorders and emotional relationships.

In treatment and characterization, Paa has a certain breeziness and a brand of humour which, although awkward and laboured in parts, tries to remind us that life is worth living even when it sucks. It reaffirms the same positivity canon that many mainstream Hollywood films exploit while depicting disease and death. Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump are just two examples. But despite the good, Paa should just have been Auro’s story; it should have been a story more deeply committed to the child—and other children like him—and his unique condition.

Some might fear Paa would be a depressing, melodramatic film or a shadow of 2005’s heavily emotional Black. It’s not, and neither does it have any link to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button…R Balki outdoes himself with a film that’s intelligent, entertaining and visually arresting.

It’s indeed a pleasure presenting four stars to a film after years. You don’t want to miss this one.

For the longest time now, I’ve been waiting for an Amitabh film that I really enjoyed. Finally, it’s here. I wouldn’t want to adjoin any more superlatives to his performance and the challenges he must have faced in getting it all right, I would want you to go and find out for yourself.