JOIN USWhen the dust settles on the 42nd ‘Toronto International Film Festival’, it is probably the uproar over Priyanka Chopra’s Sikkim faux pas that will stay in the minds of Indian movie fans. Nothing could be more out of line.
Three quality actors who Bollywood could use much more of - Tisca Chopra, Sayani Gupta and relative newbie Zoya Hussain - are the ones who should be remembered for their sterling performances in two of the three Indian films in the festival’s ‘Special Presentations’ this year.
The two films are Anurag Kashyap’s socio-politically inflected boxing drama ‘Mukkabaaz’ (The Brawler) and Bornila Chatterjee’s gutsy Shakespeare adaptation ‘The Hungry’, which journeys into the darkness at the heart of Delhi’s business and political world.
Tisca Chopra, best known for her roles in ‘Taare Zameen Par’ and ‘Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost’, plays the lead in ‘The Hungry’ the scion of a business family who is a variation on the Shakespearean villainess Tamora (from ‘The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus’).
The character pulls out the stops to avenge the brutal killing of her elder son. The actor, on her part, plunges headlong into the spirit of the woman whose ladylike demeanour hides a steely soul.
In effecting an outright inversion of the Bollywood stereotype of a mother figure into a murderous schemer, the seasoned actor is on the top of her game, informing her performance with depth and nuance.
“When you are dealing with Shakespeare, you know that you will have to go all out as a performer,” says Chopra, who credits include 2010’ ‘10ml Love’, a loose adaptation of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. ‘The Hungry is completely different in tone and tenor,” says the actor.
“The character I play has early shades of Lady Macbeth. It was after all created by Shakespeare when he was only in his 20s. As an experience, ‘The Hungry’ is as close to the theatre as a film can be,” says Chopra.