Here’s a saccharine, smile-through-your-tears feelgood weepie from India, partly shot in London and quirkily narrated from the grave. It’s inspired by the life of an Indian teenager, Aisha Chaudhary, born with a rare immune deficiency disorder, and is a film that doesn’t invite you to shed a tear so much as hold a bucket full of chopped onions under your face until you can’t take it any more. I have to admit, it did the job on me. Reader, I sobbed.
Aisha’s perky voiceover (“By the way I’m dead, get over it”) is less irritating than the plinky plonky twee soundtrack. Speaking postmortem, she tells the story of how her parents – played by Bollywood stars Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar – met and fell in love in Delhi. They bring her as baby to Great Ormond Street hospital for a bone marrow transplant and settle in London. Here’s where I had my first wobble, when a radio station for London’s south Asian community puts out an appeal to raise £120,000 for little Aisha’s operation and the donations roll in, a fiver here, a couple of quid there.
Fast forward to Aisha’s teens, and the family relocate back to India. By this time, her dad has made a fortune in the the fast-food industry and Aisha (Zaira Wasim) is a fearless, funny young woman. But in Delhi she develops pulmonary fibrosis and must decide whether to go down the route of a lung transplant which may prolong her life by 10 years. Aisha is against the idea: “You think it will be easier to die at 28 than 18?” The Sky Is Pink is a film that dollops on the syrup, but there are occasional moments such as this one that shine with truth. The ending is unforgivably mawkish, though, and the running time of two-and-a-quarter hours is simply too long.
