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Antara mali’s route to success
It is a role that is in sharp contrast to Antara’s earlier starrer, Company in which she played a typical sari-clad Maharashtrian girl from the slums, married to an underworld crook. With heavyweights like Mohan Lal, Ajay Devgan and Vivek Oberoi dominating the screen, her presence went virtually unnoticed. "I can now say that I am here forever," she reveals with obvious pride. "But then, playing Kanu in Company was also a fantastic experience. Each day of shooting was a celebration for me. So, when it was over and people came to congratulate me for my performance. I didn’t feel anything." Antara is very much her own person. Brought up on Ayn Rand and Calvin & Hobbes, she is not your usual Bollywood actress mounting cliches for effect. She is the sort to come up with a line like, "You dance tap when you are happy", and not stop to check whether it registers. Influences on her life have been many — childhood in a hostel at St Mary’s in Pune, photography from her father Jagdish Mali, theatre from her actress mother, Priti, painting from her grandfather and her own "voyages" into different dance forms such as Kathak, jazz and tap. So how did cinema happen? "It was for a Telugu
film that Ram Gopal Varma first cast me," she narrates. "I
realised then that I was most comfortable playing other people. I could
reinvent myself with every shot. I was in full bloom the moment I
stepped in front of the camera. Till then, I could not give myself
completely to anything." |
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"I am who I am because of where I come from — my own rites of passage. Ramuji gave me opportunity and let me blossom into an actress. I believe he is the greatest director ever and a thorough professional. If tomorrow, he thought I was not suitable for a role, he wouldn’t take me in his film. In any case, my innings in the film industry has just begun." She does not confirm if she is in Varma’s upcoming Bhoot and for that matter, refuses to talk about her other films: "I want to take one day at a time because I am responsible for myself. I am my own child and which parent would not want her child to be supremely happy?" Elaborating, she confesses that she is yet to figure out what causes happiness: "My ambition in life is to ascent to a plane of mind from where I can see clearly what it is that makes me happy or sad. I should then have the power to get happiness!" MF |
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ONE
of the lasting impressions from Rajat Mukherjee’s debut-making Road
is Antara Mali’s electrifying performance — a role that crackles
with pure sensuousness and raw feminine energy and yet, does not
transgress the norms of decency.