Turning to Page 3: Madhur Bhandarkar and the Media Moment of ‘Glamour’

Releasing half a decade into the new millennium, Page 3 indicated the arrival of a moment in journalism where news and entertainment were firmly entrenched within each other’s spheres of influence. Now competing with private television news, print media couldn’t help but adopt some of the strategies employed by tabloids and gossip magazines. Page 3 was a page in the “City” sections of newspapers dedicated to showcasing photos and stories of the rich and famous. This page would highlight new party hubs, fashion trends, and sometimes act as a public relations exercise for those also involved in philanthropy. Mostly projecting a more liberated and wealthier India, the page also carried with it a whiff of scandal and the anxieties generated by “Western” influence. Madhur Bhandarkar is perhaps the best-known chronicler of this specific moment, with his films Page 3, Fashion (2008), and Heroine 🐬(2012), tapping into these anxieties and producing narratives starring women in lead roles. With critical acclaim, multiple awards between them, including National Film Awards, and moderate to good box office returns, Madhur Bhandarkar became a sought-after filmmaker.

Bhandarkar has been lauded for making successful films with women in lead roles who inhabit complex worlds. The influence of director Ram Gopal Varma, who he assisted in Rangeela (1995), is visible in his framing of Mumbai as a city of stark contrasts. Most of his films are in search of a language to harmonize the demands of drama with the desire to explain and document. The women characters, therefore, emerge either from Mumbai’s streets in films like Chandni Bar (2001) and Traffic Signal (2007), or from specific industries like fashion, self-care products, jewellery, advertising and media such as Page 3, Corporate (2006), Fashion, Heroine, and Calendar Girls (2015). These women are unapologetic about drinking, smoking or having sex outside of marriage. They fight for their place in a cutthroat world, and are not afraid to be judged for it. In the latter group of films, women often revel in a flamboyant elite performativity that men don’t, except perhaps those who are gay or bisexual, who, while very visible in his films, are shoehorned into stereotypes. It is clear that Bhandarkar was very interested in covering both directions of the flow of capital in Mumbai in the 1990s and 2000s—the underworld on the one side and corporate capital on the other. In contrast to Ram Gopal Varma, whose films such as Rangeela (1995), Satya (1998) and Company (2002), had male protagonists, Bhandarkar’s choice of making women his protagonists allowed him to explore a moral side to this flow of capital. While Varma’s films excelled at making us feel empathy for flawed people, Bhandarkar placed himself, and by extension, the audience, firmly in the role of the observer who is witness to all that is happening in the city. His films, therefore, arise from the energies generated by the word ‘glamour’. He isn’t really interested so much in the worlds of the industries themselves, but how they project themselves in the media. The hook was always about the fall of the icon, the model, the star. This meant that the films themselves were textured like the tabloid-style journalism he was critiquing in Page 3, exemplified by the Lata Mangeshkar song “Kitne Ajeeb Rishte Hain Yahan Pe” from the film. Confusion reigns in these films, producing either conservative backlash or melancholia. It’s also not an accident that certain side characters in these films also pop up as insider-observers to comment on the state of things. This kind of filmmaking, which seeks to expose the inner lives of those who carefully curate their public image, shares its impulse with sting operations as well as older forms of paparazzi. In the present stage of the internet, the role of the journalist has been altered, as the overwhelming presence of social media erases the need for mediation through print or television news. Even the paparazzi—earlier dependent on news outlets for sustenance—now have dedicated audiences of their own. Page 3🔜, therefore, feels like a film firmly entrenched in the past.

Bhandarkar has claimed that the film was inspired by his own experiences of being an entrant in Bombay’s elite circles, including attending parties as well as a funeral, which to him, was just another extension of their public performance. In the film, Konkona Sen Sharma, in her Hindi film debut as journalist Madhavi Sharma, seems like its director’s conduit. While friendly and comfortable with her subjects, she is mostly played as a straight-faced witness to the goings-on at the parties. The central narrative follows her as she slowly grows disillusioned with the journalism she practices. She finds solace in investigative journalism as a crime 🐬beat reporter, under the guidance of Vinayak Mane (Atul Kulkarni). It is here that she experiences the humdrum of the city, as well as serious events like riots and bomb-blasts. All of this leads to her working with the police, where she exposes a child sexual abuse racket being run by one of her regular-party-goers under the garb of funding an orphanage. Instead of being rewarded, however, she is fired as the abuser is also one of the advertisers of her newspaper. Defeated and dejected, she is forced to be a ‘Page 3 journalist’ for another newspaper. 

Like most of Bhandarkar’s films, Page 3 🐻is a mishmash of different genres. Part-satire, part-slice of life drama, and part-investigative drama, it lampoons Mumbai’s elite by caricaturing their personas as well as directly implicating them in the moral degradation of the city. One such sequence is a drug bust carried out by Inspector Bhonsle (Upendra Limaye). He enters a nightclub, where drugs and alcohol are flowing freely, and shuts everything down. When he is rounding up people, one young woman uses a slur while venting out against this disruption by the police. Hearing this, Bhonsle turns around, takes away the cigarette she is smoking, and schools this woman in English, “first, try to be a good, cultured Indian. Then try to be ‘Western’. Okay?” By this point in the film, youngsters like these women, who go to nightclubs, drink and smoke, and consume party drugs, have already been set up as part of the shallow and self-serving class of wealthy individuals. In the following sequence, the drug pusher, a working-class man, is thrown out of a moving police van by Bhonsle, only to be mowed down by a police bus. Vinayak Mane, the crime beat reporter that sees himself as a ‘real’ journalist as opposed to Page 3 journalists, communicates to Bhonsle that he will leave the death of the drug dealer out of his report. Wry smiles are exchanged. An understanding is reached.

In 2025, director Madhur Bhandarkar no longer commands the kind of attention he did around the release of the Kareena Kapoor Khan-starrer Heroine. His last major theatrical Hindi film release was the Emergency-set Indu Sarkar (2017), which was accused of being sympathetic to the current ruling dispensation’s narrative. This possible turn also provides us with hindsight about Page 3꧋’s politics. The choice to claim the position of an observer without bias seems much more questionable today. One cannot deny that the opposition to the English-speaking elite that the film fervently foments can easily be extended to intellectuals who are involved in social causes. The ‘police encounter’ in the film evokes mild amusement by a journalist who is part of the film’s moral centre, revealing authoritarian impulses. Nevertheless, the film still serves as an important document, perhaps even a prophetic one, when it came to how the media would, over the years, succumb to demands from advertisers and sponsors.

Piyush Chhabra is a Ph.D Scholar of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He works on the entanglements between law and different media forms.