By Vikram Phukan
Earlier this year, our mid-year picks brought out the indie soul of Bollywood, before a litany of blockbusters took over the box-office in quick succession. Female actors often have precious little to do in many of these ’100-crore’ bonanzas. However, this year has certainly reaped a rich harvest of great turns by women, several of which have been in films that have done reasonably well commercially. A common theme that has emerged is how the ‘bad girl’ seems to have been catapulted to centrestage, indicating that audiences are perhaps increasingly able to view women outside the mould of tailor-made propriety.
Vidya Balan’s performance as the actress Silk, in The Dirty Picture, is sometimes seen as a function of the excess kilos she ‘bravely’ put on for the role, or of her being able to pull off the bawdy act convincingly. In a pivotal scene in the movie, when a heavily-sedated (and over the hill) Silk stumbles out of the sets of a soft-porn film—the shooting of which has just been busted—into a once-familiar neighbourhood where the chaste echoes of the girl she once was can still be found, Balan does more than just display a lack of vanity in ill-fitting ‘sexy’ attire. She manages to get as unnervingly close as possible to the emotional truth of her character, demonstrating, in devastating close-up, the laceration of a woman’s psyche, and the embittered morale of an actress being pushed into oblivion, even as she continues to hold on for just about as long as she can. While it is uncertain how much of real-life starlet Silk Smitha’s life has been plundered here for the purposes of cinematic license (The Dirty Picture is essentially an exploitation flick in the guise of a B-movie), Balan creates her Silk in the mould of a free spirit and a game-changer, who seems strangely untouched by the sleaze around her, almost like a diamond in the raw. It’s a piece de resistance turn that nicely complements her less showy but superbly crafted part in No One Killed Jessica. Balan is undeniably the actress of the year.
Vidya Balan in The Dirty Picture. Image courtesy Film Impressions
Although Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Saheb Biwi aur Gangster is not really a remake of the Abrar Alvi classic (sharing only some narrative themes with it), its leading actress Mahie Gill acquits herself well enough to emerge from the shadow of Meena Kumari’ gut-wrenching portrayal of the sex-starved wife of a feudal lord who takes to alcohol with a vengeance. Gill’s pill-popping Chhoti Bahu is also as emotionally ravaged, and driven to bouts of attention-seeking hysteria, but she is also cannily observant of her own situation and possessing of the enterprise with which she can subvert her lot, either by engaging in a passionate tryst with her driver in response to her man’s infidelities, or by wresting control of her husband’s fiefdom in a delicious climatic twist. Gill extends her range to edgier territory, while still holding on to a kind of rawness that makes her a shoo-in for parts that don’t fall within the realm of candy-floss cinema.
In her films, Kalki Koechlin usually lugs around the persona of someone so utterly self-possessed that it is difficult to imagine that there could be an emotionally fragile side to her. In That Girl in Yellow Boots — as Ruth, a British girl in search of her Indian father—she may still be one hard cookie, but she allows us to look, beyond that impassiveness, at what’s simmering just under the surface. In the process, she gives a maudlin tale (a script she has co-written with Anurag Kashyap) a shot of vitality. Her shaky hold over the local tongue adds to Ruth’s earthy child-like bearing (her portions in English seem surprisingly hokey in comparison), and Koechlin delivers a performance of splintered elegance, even with the film being set in a seedy massage parlour in Mumbai. Given the film’s inconsistent emotional tenor, she still manages to steer Ruth towards a heart-rending denouement—in what is a fully-realised performance more so than her work in Shaitan, where she is more of an art installation—a metaphor for the times—than a real person.
This year some of our more seasoned actors have played women grappling with bereavement. In Memories in March, Deepti Naval is wonderfully stoic as she deals with the untimely death of her son in a car accident, creating a stillness in her performance that allows each poignant moment to breathe. It’s only when she discovers that her son was gay, that the potent mix—of emotions and conflict and moral indignance—pierces into the silence as Naval negotiates the transitions with lilting compassion in a film that is ultimately more a bitter-sweet tale of warmth and acceptance than a paean to suffering.
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