Tour de force

The competition is hotting up. No Bollywood heroine has been caught smiling sportingly while Vidya Balan accepted the Best Actress trophy at various award functions in February. Her bold and brassy performance as a semi-fictionalised version of Chennai’s late cabaret queen Silk Smitha has been recognised at the National Awards, too, which had otherwise overlooked brilliant female performances like Rani Mukherjee’s in Black or Tabu’s in Astitva.

Surprisingly, the only piece of showbiz appreciation received by Vidya Balan has been from Shabana Azmi, who rarely has a kind word for any other heroine. After watching Kahaani, in which Balan is outstanding once again, the senior artiste tweeted, “Amazed by Vidya in Kahaani. For the fifth consecutive time, she achieves excellence.” The reference is to the 34-year-old leading lady’s tour de force performances in Ishqiya, Paa, No One Killed Jessica, The Dirty Picture and Kahaani.

Trade vigilantes, given to exaggeration perhaps, are calling her “the new Khan in town”. But can she really entice the audience as much as, say, Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan do? Not likely at all. Still, the fact that the movie bosses are finally accepting the box-office clout of a heroine is more than a positive sign in a business which has been strictly male-dominated ever since its inception.

During earlier decades, Mumtaz and Hema Malini were also deified but were not assigned roles that required a degree of serious acting. Of late, when it comes to meaningful, above-the-cut cinema, the choices have largely been Konkona Sen Sharma and Nandita Das. However, they haven’t been seen much ever since their marriages and in the case of Konkona, motherhood. Tabu, too, another formidable actress, has chosen to wait for international projects ever since she completed shooting for the Ang Lee-directed Life of Pi, scheduled for release this year-end. This leaves the field open to Vidya Balan to take over the status which was once accorded to Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil, who could straddle the worlds of hyper-commercial as well as arthouse cinema simultaneously.

The knee-jerk reaction of the A-list Bollywood heroines has been to immediately rush into the award-mode. It is no national secret that Kareena Kapoor aims to win all the honours next year for Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine, in which she portrays a celebrity who is exploited ruthlessly somewhat along the lines of Marilyn Monroe. For a while talk had circulated that Kareena is, in fact, enacting the life story of Manisha Koirala who ruined her career by hitting the bottle. Bhandarkar, however, has denied this conjecture vehemently.

Bhandarkar’s heroines are assigned such strong roles that they are usually in the running for awards and even win them, like Tabu did for Chandni Bar. When Bipasha Basu was cast in Corporate, quite naturally she expected to carry home some awards too. That didn’t happen but doubtlessly Bhandarkar and Kareena Kapoor are likely to make a no-efforts-spared bid for the awards, major and minor. That won’t be a cakewalk exactly since Vidya Balan will surely be among the nominations once again for playing the feisty, pregnant woman in search of her husband in Kolkata.

The key question is — can Vidya Balan prevent the non-stop acclaim and applause from going to her head? A post-graduate in sociology, she is a self-effacing and intelligent woman. That’s why perhaps it isn’t quite comprehensible why she recently dropped out of director Shyam Benegal’s dream project adapted from the classic opera Carmen. Reportedly, her beau, Siddharth Roy Kapoor, a producer with a film corporation influenced her decision. Since Benegal and she had been discussing the project for nearly a year, her rejection was impolite. “It happens,” Benegal said stoically. “Vidya just sent me a message that she couldn’t do the film and that was that. My producers are now trying to sign up Priyanka Chopra.”

Such aberrations apart, Vidya Balan is rocking Bollywood. But it could be understood that line from The Dirty Picture, “Cinema means entertainment, entertainment, entertainment… and nothing else” isn’t entirely correct. If she has to retain her image of a serious actress, she must remember that a smidgen of sense and sensibility is appreciated too. Her The Dirty Picture will be remembered but not her travesties like Heyy Babyy! and Kismat Konnection.

(The writer has been reviewing Bollywood for decades, has scripted three films and directed three 
others. Currently, he is working on a documentary and just finished a book of short stories.)