Mili places Janhvi Kapoor far ahead of her contemporaries

Have you been wondering as I have, about that one outstanding actress in the post- Sridevi generation who could  carry her legacy forward? No, it’s not Deepika Padukone. She has a  pretty face and a dignified screen presence. But she never had range of a Nutan, Meena Kumari  Vyjayanthimala , Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Jaya Bhaduri, Mumtaz or Sridevi.  She never will.

Or for that matter, Waheeda Rehman. I know it is blasphemous to suggest that she is  overrated. But she is. Indian audiences are an emotional lot. They synergize the characters with the performances. Waheedaji has spent a lifetime playing dignified hurt characters. Audiences love her for being a martyr.

I mention all this, as it is easy to overlook Janhvi Kapoor ’s performance in Mili as something her mother would have done much better. Please stop those absurd comparisons. Sridevi was Sridevi. Janhvi is her own person, happy to forge her own direction in the trajectory of her career.

In Mili, she gets to play…ummmm…Mili, not only because her dad Boney Kapoor is the producer (of course that helps). Beyond the favouritism, Janhvi proves she is her own person.  She brings the soft vulnerability and hard determination of Anna Ben from the original Malayalam film. In the first 45 minutes of this cannily crafted survival drama, we see Mili and her dad( the wonderful Manoj Pahwa) bickering arguing screaming at one another just as all  fathers and daughters do.

Let me stop right here to say if the film works so well, it is not just Janhvi’s amazingly dedicated performance. It is also Pahwa’s capabilities to ride over the bumpy ground to keep  his character’s nose to the grindstone. Indeed, Pahwa’s wah-wah bonding with his daughter reminded me of  Ashok Kumar and Jaya Bhaduri in that other classic Mili in 1975.

Director Mathukutty Xavier tells us what a remake is meant to do: Mili tells the same story as the Malayalam original. But the cultural relocation and the other changes are achieved with  seamless grace. The core of the conflict remains unchanged. Which daughter doesn’t rebuke  her father for smoking secretly and which father won’t be upset if he has to meet his daughter’s boyfriend at the police station for the first time?

Incidentally, the Christian-Muslim love alliance in the original has been played down in Hindi. The  boyfriend’s name has been changed from Azhar to Sameer Kumar which could be anyone’s  name.  But strangely, the dirty cop brings up Hindu-Muslim issue when Mili goes missing.

The slimy cop-in-charge and the boyfriend are played persuasively by Anurag Arora and Sunny Kaushal , who struggle with the  God  Cop and  Sincere Lover’s clichéd parts adding nuances that perhaps only they were able to imagine.

In Mili, the tempo of the narrative moves fluently from father-daughter kinship to survival drama. None of the transitions are jerky. Every character has a redeeming moment except the bad Cop Anurag Arora, who remains so stubbornly evil till the end, it feels like he belongs  in another film. And yes, watch out for Jackie Shroff in one of the best written cameos in recent cinematic history.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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