Rajat Kapoor, the one we know more as an actor who lights up the screen with his wide range of acting – be it as the paedophile in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding or the fading superstar in Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand and many roles in between – has also made three interesting feature films as a director, Private Detective-Two Plus Two Plus One (which remains unseen by the public), Raghu Romeo and Mixed Doubles. Kapoor, a graduate of the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, started his career as an assistant to avant garde filmmakers Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul, and devoured cinema day in and day out, winning two national awards for his short films and one for Raghu Romeo.

All this has come to roost now, as he comes up with a fantastic piece of cinema called Mithya, which with its taut script and brilliant acting by an ensemble cast led by the highly-talented Ranvir Sheorey, has every potential to achieve cult status in the comic-thriller genre of films.

Mithya is the kind of cinema that will be categorised by critics as one belonging to the “multiplex genre”, though it practically means nothing except that it is likely to appeal more to the urban audiences. But it won’t be surprising if the film reaches out to a much wider audience if marketed well, as it has almost all the ingredients that make intelligent and engrossing cinema that can connect to any normal moviegoer. 

Kapoor is one of those directors working in the Mumbai film industry, the so-called Bollywood, who would not let themselves succumb to the so-called pressures of the market to indulge in mindless tomfoolery in the name of entertainment. Instead, what he believes in is giving viewers some intelligent entertainment, something that tells a story in a thought-provoking way without being preachy.

And he believes in weaving his stories around everyday characters, people like you and me, with whom we cross our paths every day. Raghu Romeo and Mixed Doubles were stories told in such fashion, about such people, though from two different strata of society. Now, with Mithya, which Kapoor had written long before making Raghu Romeo, Kapoor takes this fine art of his to another level.

The film, also called The Imposter Who Wasn’t for the global market, had its premiere at the last Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema to a rousing reception, and now it gets ready to hit the market at a time when films like Khosla Ka Ghosla and Bheja Fry have proved that small, intelligent films marketed even more intelligently can come good critically as also at the Box Office.

The premise of the story is not new – it is about a person who gets mistaken for somebody else. There is that most famous example of Akira Kurosawa’s 1980 film Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior). But that is where the similarity ends, as Kapoor sets his film in the Mumbai Underworld and puts a struggling actor VK, played by Sheorey in the midst of it all. Kapoor developed the seed of the story from a mythical tale involving Lord Vishnu and Sage Narada, and aided by Rafey Mahmood’s moody cinematography and an interesting background score by Sagar Desai, he develops this tragic-comic thriller to a crescendo-filled climax.

The story of the film is simple. An almost out of job struggling actor, who earns his bread by giving occasional voice over for cartoon serials, is given an acting assignment to die for, literally, as a gangster’s rivals, seeing the resemblance two have in appearance, plants the actor in the latter’s family after bumping him off. Till then leading a humdrum existence, suddenly the actor finds himself amidst a life-and-death situation, with only acting skills being his saving grace.

Only a handful of people in the rival gang knows his identity, and among them are a gangster’s moll, played by Neha Dhupia, with whom VK slowly develops an emotional relationship. With a fine casting comprising among others a brilliant-as-usual Vinay Pathak and the veteran Naseeruddin Shah who does not get to do much, the film is a study of the human psyche as VK goes through a gamut of emotional upheavals while playacting the don to his gang and a man of the family to his wife and children.

If Pathak showed that he can be the “hero” of a hit film through Bheja Fry, it might as well be the turn of his close friend Sheorey to repeat that feat, particularly as he gets an incredible role to display his acting prowess, taking the viewer in a ride that gives one the scope to share the character’s emotions. As the frustrated actor who is driven by the circumstances to impersonate a don, he has given in this film what is without doubt one of the landmark performances in recent Indian cinema.

The film begins with a distinct comic strain, but as it progresses, it becomes darker and comes to a tragic end, and Sheorey towering above all with his performance of a Chaplinesque character who becomes an unwilling imposter, and with whom one laughs and cries.

Mithya, produced by Planman Motion Pictures, is a film that will establish Kapoor as a director who has now found his firm foothold, and Ranvir as an actor who can really scorch the screen without being pretentious about it – and without being in the league of conventional stars who give more flops than hits but still get to rule the popularity charts thanks to their publicity managers.