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Characters with flecks of gray, female lead actors who are fine with looking fat and ugly, and heroes who are ready to turn bad for a good role are making cinema more interesting for Bollywood buffs, says Rachna Bisht-rawat.
If you are a Bollywood buff, chances are you have your eyes peeled for new releases. I wonder if you have caught on to the new trend that is making cinema more interesting.
Wouldn’t want to jinx it, but it does look like Bollywood’s chocolate heroes are finally bored with playing the good guys. They’ve turned bad with a bang. Or a dhoom, if you please.
In a slew of new Hindi films, some of Bollywood’s high-testosterone heroes who have mostly, so far, rescued damsels in distress and saved the world are being seen in bad-man avatars.
You couldn’t have missed Sanjay Dutt with his evil sneer, sinister tattoos and bald head, making the heart go cold in the darkness of the cinema hall, in Agneepath. The Gita-mouthing Kancha Cheena was so scary that he scared the macho Dutt himself.
While shooting the climax, Sanjay said he needed to ask the director for an unscheduled break to get away from the evil of his own character. For Dutt, playing the negative lead has been inspired by the villains of Hollywood flicks like Spider Man and Batman, who are larger than life. And also the fact that at 48, he can only play a 40-year-old and not a 20-year-old college kid anymore.
Aamir Khan, who went ahead and did just that (play a college kid at 40 in 3 Idiots with a lot of well-deserved accolades), seems to be following suit. He is the main villain of Dhoom 3 and though his look is still tightly under wraps, the net is buzzing with excitement and projecting him as a close crop-sporting biker with a snarling black tattoo covering half his face.
He also created a buzz some time back by entering a Thai spa in a salt and pepper French beard, with dark back-brushed gelled hair, again sparking off rumours that that was his antihero look for Dhoom 3. Khan himself is calling the villain he is going to play “a uniquely written character” who will surprise his fans.
Good guys gone bad
Character actors or even former Bollywood heroes who have now started doing character roles have also been leading this trend. Rishi Kapoor was skin-crawling evil as the unscrupulous pimp Rauf Lala with dark kaajal-lined eyes and a penchant for holding young girls by their hair and selling them off to the highest bidder from a public platform in Agneepath.
Regular movie goers couldn’t have missed the inimitable Naseeruddin Shah either who played South Indian superstar Surya in The Dirty Picture with his tight T-shirts, white pants and puke-eliciting remarks like “jawaani toh chakhne ke liye hoti hai”. As the terrible but hit actor Surya, who brags about his bedroom capers and happily plays college kid to ex-heroines doing the “maa” role, Shah was delightful.
It could be a reflection of how society is going or maybe just an urge to satisfy creative urges, gathering dust from doing too many goody-two-shoes roles but Bollywood boys are breaking the mould of goodness.
Shah Rukh Khan has already delighted fans with his portrayal of the tech-savvy, pony-tailed, ruthless Don in Farhan Akhtar’s Don 2; Saif’s Agent Vinod even gives us a gay moment when he trips an airline steward, making him fall into his lap. And not to forget, after a few minutes of mourning the death of Kareena, his love interest in the film, happily goes back to romancing a curvy bikini-clad beach beauty.
Ranbir in long matted hair and salwars guiltlessly seduces a happily-married Nargis Fakhri in Rockstar; moral values can go to the dogs.
With audiences game for something new and different, Bollywood is experimenting with looks and roles for its lead actors. And movie-goers are not complaining. Bollywood films are no longer glamourised, moral science lessons and the main leads are not gods anymore. Actually, the more interesting ones are as evil as Satan.
Last heard, Vivek Oberoi had stepped in the villain’s shoes for Krrish 3, a role that lead actor Hrithik Roshan also preferred to do, but Daddy didn’t listen; Ranbir had put his cute boy-next-door image on hold again for playing Murphy, a deaf-mute roadside rowdy in Anurag Basu’s Barfi and Aamir was getting ready to shoot for the evil guy in Dhoom 3.
Gender bender
All this leaves us happy, but with just one big question. If Bollywood alpha males are going the villainous way, who’s going to play the gutsy hero? Going by Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani, looks like it is time for the girls to take over.
With Ishqiya, The Dirty Picture, and now Kahaani, Vidya Balan is being projected as the newest hero in Bollywood. She has made female centric, no-formula films ring the cash register and has also gathered critical acclaim. The other girls can take her example. The boys can continue to turn bad.