Given yet another 100-crore bonanza at the turnstiles, Kareena Kapoor might be sitting pretty as the No 1 actress at the box office these days. Raju Shelar/Firstpost
By Vikram Phukan
Given yet another 100-crore bonanza at the turnstiles, Kareena Kapoor might be sitting pretty as the No 1 actress at the box office these days. But she’s probably never allowed to forget that for a really long time she was just Lil’ Miss Jinx (in the grand tradition of box-office poison like Meenakshi Sheshadri and Raveena Tandon). It took a few author-backed roles during her extended lean phase to bring Kapoor back into contention.
Dev lent her instant gravitas when she was shooting her mouth off in interviews, Chameli showcased her natural audaciousness to great effect (and is therefore perfect for her imminent Tussaudification), Omkara proved she had acting chops to spare, and Jab We Metfinally endeared her polarising persona to the masses. But more than the hits, there been the roles that she has passed by, or the roles that were never meant to be. They represent a kind of lost oeuvre that a top actress would have surely given anything to include in her repertoire.
It took a few author-backed roles during her extended lean phase to bring Kapoor back into contention. Raju Shelar/Firstpost
For example, a biopic on Noor Inayat Khan, based on the book The Spy Princess, by Shrabani Basu. Khan was a conflicted heroine, a wireless operator who was air-dropped into Nazi-infested France during World War II. She refused to abandon her outpost even when all other wireless agents had been arrested; dodged capture for months; escaped twice from incarceration under the Nazis, and was eventually cruelly beaten before being shot from behind. Kapoor has a natural aversion for ‘action’ roles, but Khan was a covert operative not a paratrooper. Would-be director Shyam Benegal said (in 2010), “I know the girl who will be perfect as Noor Inayat Khan. Kareena Kapoor. She looks so much like her.” That film never went ahead.
Benegal has wooed Kapoor before for his other yet-to-begin production, Chamki Chameli, an Indian take on Bizet’s 1875 opera, Carmen. He said (in 2009), “She is a beautiful woman, a terrific dancer and a proven actress. She would make a great Chameli.” Carmen, from the opera, is a feisty woman with a libido to match. It would be a difficult role for Kapoor, who can seem frigid and inhibited when it comes to portraying ‘bad women possessing of a wanton sensuality’, as in her films Fida and Tashan where even a lime-green bikini couldn’t rescue her. Farhan Akhtar had once said, “Kareena has the knack of being able to carry off almost anything without ever looking vulgar.” That kind of clean-cut glamour doesn’t quite make her a shoo-in for the part of Carmen, a gypsy woman who wears her vulgarity on her sleeve in a full-blooded big-breasted manner, although she did show glimpses of that spunk in Sudhir Mishra’s similarly-named Chameli.
There was some recent chatter of Hollywood make-up ‘experts’ singling out Kapoor for the part of Indira Gandhi in a biopic by Krishna Shah known only for his 1978 fiasco, Shalimar. Perhaps this is a role that Kapoor is not quite ready for. Which brings us to Mishra’s Dhruv, where her role is modeled on the more easily enacted Priyanka Gandhi. An ambitious film co-starring Kapoor, Akhtar, and Chitrangada Singh, this has been variously described as a political drama, as yet another take on the Devdas ménage à trois (with Kapoor standing in for Paro) and an Indian adaptation of Hamlet. “It works only with Kareena, no one else. It’s now more like Shakespeare’s Hamlet than Devdas. I can’t imagine anyone but Kareena in the role,” says Mishra. The film has been on the waiting list of production house Excel Entertainment for some time, where another Kareena-starrer Kismet Talkies is also taking ages to get to the floors.
Benegal has wooed Kapoor before for his other yet-to-begin production, Chamki Chameli, an Indian take on Bizet's 1875 opera, Carmen. Image courtesy: Film Impressions.
That film, supposedly Zoya Akhtar’s dream project, pairs her with her early co-star Hrithik Roshan. Now that Zoya has lost a lot of face with her ‘Big Bad Bollywood Blockbuster‘, maybe she can return to her own aesthetic sensibilities and revive Kismet Talkies, a thriller set against the backdrop of a degenerate tinsel-town, with Kapoor playing an obsessive fan of a superstar. While both actors have played straight-laced lovers in their films together, their combustible chemistry has a distinct star-crossed quality to it, more suited to a narrative that deals with thwarted love than anything run-of-the-mill.
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