At the scene of the crime

My Mirror column.

Watching Kahaani 2 triggers a retrospective look at the city’s role in Vidya Balan’s actorly career.

Vidya Balan as an urban working mother in Kahaani 2

The new Kahaani 2 is nowhere near as good as 2012's Kahaani: its mystery is less mystifying, its cops are less attractive, its villains are caricatures who fail to chill. The plot is not a continuation of Kahaani's, and nor do the two films have any characters in common.

There, now, that's out of the way, we can get on to the real business of this column — which is to try and understand what Vidya Balan is trying to do with her star persona. I can hear the surprised reaction already: “But Vidya Balan isn't a star. She's an actor.”

I agree. Balan is indeed one of the few A-list female stars in Mumbai who does not seem to care at all about appearances — by which I mean not that she isn't good-looking, but that she isn't always striving to look her best. In fact, as I wrote in a 2014 op-ed, “Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else.”

Roles like ones she held in The Dirty Picture (in which Balan played the Southern sex star Silk Smitha with rare physical ease) or the hilarious, sadly underwatched Ghanchakkar (where she appeared to revel in the OTT outfits worn by her fashion-addicted housewife character) would seem to suggest that the actor's plan is to not have a plan.

And yet, since watching Kahaani 2, I have begun to see a distinct pattern in Balan's cinematic appearances. There is a kinship among many of her recent characters that can only be explained as the slow, perhaps organic — and perhaps inevitable — crafting of a star persona.

For one, Balan — in conjunction with her directors, most energetically Sujoy Ghosh, but also Ribhu Dasgupta and Samar Sheikh — seems to have taken it upon herself to craft for the Hindi film heroine a new relationship with the Indian city. (The cities chosen for this project so far are interesting, too: Calcutta in Kahaani, Te3n and Kahaani 2, and Hyderabad in Bobby Jasoos.) Again and again, Balan plays female protagonists who get to traverse the streets of Indian cities with an abandon that is rare in real life — and practically unseen on screen.

Second, unlike the many mainstream heroines whose on-screen explorations in urban space are limited by class and the protective company of men, Balan's indefatigable female characters walk the city alone, and with purpose. What is fascinating is how frequently this purpose involves a crime.

Vidya Balan tracks her sister's killers in No One Killed Jessica (2011)

As far back as Raj Kumar Gupta's No One Killed Jessica (2011), as Sabrina, the sister of murdered real-life model Jessica Lal, we saw Balan slice fiercely through Delhi's fog of fakery, crisscrossing that city's party venues and police stations in search of an elusive justice. As the marvellous Vidya Venkatesan Bagchi in 2012's Kahaani, she pounds through the streets of Calcutta on a mission to find her missing husband, her pregnant belly both attracting attention and deflecting it. With that wonderful double-edged mechanism in place, “Bid-da Bagchi” — as the movie's Bongs pronounced her name — runs riot, using her ingenuity to open doors across the length and breadth of the city, from seedy hotels to government offices, Park Street to Kumartuli.

From the grieving family member who finds herself on a mission against the city's obfuscations, it was a short step to playing a professional solver of urban mysteries. In Bobby Jasoos (2014), Balan enjoyed herself thoroughly, playing a roza-keeping Hyderabadi women whose uber-enthusiasm for her job as a newbie detective also involves a series of disguises: turbans and moustaches, false bosoms, Kanjeevarams and burqas all treated with the same nonchalant panache.

Vidya Balan as a cop on a case, in Te3n (2016)

In Te3n, produced by Sujoy Ghosh, which came out earlier this year, she graduated to becoming an investigator in uniform. Although she landed with the film's least fleshed-out part, Balan's turn as Sarita — the policewoman handling the kidnapping case on which Te3n turns — certainly added to her particular actorly repertoire as that rare Indian woman who traverses the city with ease, so comfortable in her own skin as to seem to our unfamiliar eyes almost belligerent.

From Poe and Conan Doyle, until the present day, the idea of the detective as an urban explorer and guide has run parallel to the idea of the city as a site of criminal imagination. So it was likely only a matter of time before Vidya's urban trajectories turned full circle: from unravelling the city's secrets as an investigator of crime, to becoming the investigated. Kahaani 2, in fact, allows us glimpses of three of these female flaneur selves: the do-gooder urban detective, the heroic everywoman and the potential criminal mastermind. Sadly, Balan's age-old good-girl persona (think Parineeta, Lage Raho Munnabhai, Jessica) prevents her Kahaani 2 character's potential doubleedged-ness from being convincing.

Maybe we need another Ishqiya to bring her dark-black mojo back.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Dec 2016.

2014: The Year of Sheroes

My Mumbai Mirror column, 28 Dec 2014. 

Hindi cinema this year gave its female actors a chance to spread out. Some punched, while others pulled no punches. What matters is that as the audience, we agreed to clap for both.

Madhuri Dixit in Dedh Ishqiya (2014)

The Hindi film industry has been hero-dominated for so many decades now that it's hard to believe that its earliest decades were all about the heroines: Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Devika Rani. But 2014 might go down in history as the year that Bombay cinema came back round to the idea that there could be hits without heroes. 

This was made possible, in some measure, by the return of Hindi cinema's last generation of big-ticket heroines. It's fabulous that at least some of these utterly deserving divas are landing age-appropriate roles in films designed to showcase their particular charms. 2012 already saw Sridevi bring a lump to every throat in the room as the guileless housewife on a journey of self-discovery in English Vinglish. 2014 marked the glorious comeback of Madhuri Dixit, who played the poetically-minded Begum Para with the perfect air of seductive mystery in January's Dedh Ishqiya, and later in the year, played off her once arch-competitor Juhi Chawla (with Chawla playing against type) in the somewhat anti-climactic Gulab Gang.  

This year also saw a more recent returnee - Rani Mukherjee came back from a longish sabbatical with the immensely watchable, cheer-eliciting Mardaani. Priyanka Chopra had her own no-heroes movie: Mary Kom. The two films couldn't be more dissimilar in theme - a punchy cop drama set in Mumbai and Delhi, and a biopic of the stocky Manipuri woman who is India's most famous boxer - but in very different ways, these were films in which female audiences derived much pleasure from watching the woman on screen emerge victorious from physical battles. Mary Kom's initial attraction to boxing is linked to beating up badly behaved boys; Shivani Roy loves shocking male rowdies with some rowdyisms of her own, and plays gleefully to the gallery as she does so. 

Rani Mukherjee in Mardaani, 2014.

Interestingly, though, both films felt the need to play up their protagonists' nurturing side - a part-explanatory, part-compensatory move to balance out all that unfeminine punching we see them do. Mukherjee's character in Mardaani, a no-bullshit female cop with the ringing name of Shivani Shivaji Roy, is given no children of her own. But she and her doctor husband play adoptive parents to a young niece, and she is moved to eradicate a ring of child traffickers because they've abducted an orphaned girl with whom she has a quasi-maternal relationship. 

Motherhood was also played up in the movie version of MC Mary Kom's life, with Mary shown risking her coach's disfavour when she decides to get married and then have children, all at the peak of her hard-won boxing career. Produced by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Omung Kumar's film devotes an inordinate amount of screen-time to showing Mary being a hands-on mom: singing her twins to sleep, nursing them to health, and so on - one can't avoid the sneaking feeling that it's all in aid of preventing audiences judging her when she does decide to return to her career, while the kids still very young. (It was lovely, though, to see a man on the Hindi film screen play a hands-on dad as competently and believably as Darshan Kumar did as Onler Kom.) 

The parade of rough-talking women continued with Kangana Ranaut's strange and over-the-top outing in and as Revolver Rani (RR). A Tarantino-inspired take on a female Chambal dacoit some two decades after Phoolan Devi and Bandit Queen, RR could have been great but was tragically uneven in tone. Later in the year, we got Richa Chadda in the depressingly awful Tamanchey: another trigger-happy female gangster, like Ranaut in RR, ready to junk it all for marriage and motherhood. 

But Ranaut's film of the year -- and everyone's favourite 'woman-centric' movie -- was Queen. Vikas Bahl's surprise hit had Ranaut deliver a terrific stream-of-consciousness performance as sheltered Delhi girl Rani who, jilted at the mandap, makes the wonderful transition from panic-stricken to determined to carefree. 

Kangana Ranaut (right) in Queen, 2014

The foreign trip as transformatory ritual isn't new (think Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara), and Rani is perhaps a younger version of Sridevi in English Vinglish—but the film wins points for a host of other things, from giggly female friendship to joyful drunken spree to first exploratory kiss with a stranger, and most importantly, Rani's non-vengeful but firm rejection of her baffled groom. Queen opened up the universe a little more. 

Two other films delivered freedom to their female protagonists in surprising guises: Alia Bhatt as the poor little rich girl who finds liberation via abduction in Highway, and Parineeti Chopra as the oddball science geek who runs away from home -- to China! -- in the under-appreciated and charming Hasee Toh Phasee. 

Vidya Balan in Bobby Jasoos, 2014

My pick for independent woman character of the year, though, is probably Vidya Balan's Hyderabadi detective in the comic mystery caper Bobby Jasoos. Perhaps because there's nothing grand or heroic about her loose-plait-and-dupatta persona. She loves her family, but will risk their ire to fulfill her dream of her own detective agency. Since she's not in the realm of myth, she neither beats up any men nor has to prove her femininity. But when personable young men open car doors for her, they encounter a brisk dismissal: "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna." For me, that's more than enough.

Woman, Uninterrupted

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Vidya Balan's free-spirited performances have opened up a space in our cinema where not just she, but other women, too, might begin to be comfortable in their skin.

In most Indian cities, it is still a rare joy to see a woman out and about on her own terms: walking, working, eating -- just being; a woman who sits comfortably in her skin, not 'adjusting' by squeezing into the smallest possible space simply because the men on either side have spread themselves out, as men do. 

And for me, at least, that joy is amplified when that woman isn't obsessively chronicling her every look, her every laugh and eyebrow twitch in some imagined mirror that is a man's face. 

Within the world of Hindi cinema, Vidya Balan is that woman. And in Bobby Jasoos, you see Balan do again what our film industry, like our public spaces, rarely let its women do: take the centre seat, settle in, and thoroughly enjoy herself. 

After the slow drying-up of Priyanka Chopra's A-for-Ambition appearances (Fashion, What's Your Rashi, Saat Khoon Maaf) -- and up until Kangana Ranaut's Queen (and the disappointing but risk-taking Revolver Rani) -- Balan has been the only heroine with commercial billing to test the Lakshman Rekhas the industry draws around its female actors. 

Having bid a loud and lusty goodbye to her good-girl reputation with Ishqiya and The Dirty Picture, she went on to carry a thriller like Kahaani entirely on her shoulders. 

After some years of grief, Balan has also figured out that her performances are enough to soar above the low-level depredations of the KJo-led fashion police. That liberation from starry compulsions translates into Balan's roles as well - can you think of anyone else in contemporary Bollywood who wouldn't have balked at doing a whole film with a big pregnant belly? Or embraced Silk Smitha's larger-than-life physically, literally spilling out of her clothes, with such joyous lack of inhibition? Or jumped with such gusto into the atrociously loud outfits of fashion-magazine-obsessed Neetu in Ghanchakkar? 

Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else. And in Bobby Jasoos, she gets to do it in the most enjoyable way possible. As an intrepid, if somewhat inept female detective, Balan's Bobby gets to walk the crowded alleys of Hyderabad's Mughalpura as everything from a turban-wearing beggar man to a young bangle seller with a wispy moustache. Balan looks like she's having as much of a good time as Bobby is meant to -- and I certainly revelled in watching Bobby, disguised as a large Kanjeevaram-clad mami with an impressive shelf of a bosom, suddenly start jumping with joy upon receiving her largest payment cheque ever. 

But it isn't just playing dress-up. For most Indian women, the idea of being able to melt invisibly into the -- inevitably male -- crowd is a pervasive fantasy. Bobby Jasoos taps into that often unarticulated yearning by having its heroine achieve, in multiple forms of masquerade, the freedom she might not have otherwise. 

By making Bobby a roza-keeping Muslim woman who's never without her dupatta, the film aims for a social realism of sorts. This is a conservative lower middle class milieu, in which a woman who hasn't married and borne children by thirty is beyond the pale, and a man having a serious chat with his son sends his wife -- who's massaging his head -- into another room. It is no surprise that Bobby's father can only respond to the gift of his daughter's first salary with the pronouncement that "This household doesn't run on women's earnings." 

Yet when Bobby wears a burqa, it is only as another form of disguise. Her usual uniform is a loose salwar-kameez, her hair escaping an untidy plait and a packet of Parle-G biscuits peeping out of her satchel. Her workaday look is also a reflection of her priorities: we have here a woman whose response to having the car door opened for her by a personable young man is to say caustically, "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna". Bobby is the elder sister who, when she needs to enter a five star hotel on assignment, gets one of her more feminine younger sisters to do her make-up. 

And yet, even while Bobby (and it's important that she insists on being called that, instead of the more feminine Bilqees) does largely what she wants, she continues to crave approval from her father (and in an interesting mirroring, from the life-changing older man who becomes her mystery client). 

The other remarkable thing about Bobby's character is that she's too busy working to bother chasing men -- and when love does appear, it is gentle and unbombastic. 

Especially for a film that returns us, after an aeon, to an all-Muslim milieu, Bobby Jasoos almost makes no concessions to romantic nazakat Muslim Social style. In fact, it sustains its tenor of comic mystery quite remarkably: if there's any gazing at feet in this movie, it's to look for a man with a missing toe. 

With Bobby Jasoos, Balan gives us a reel-life heroine who's neither a doormat nor a head-tossing rebel without a cause. She'd be a treasure even in the real world.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.