Little B stands tall

Till a year ago, he was wearing the flop badge. Today, he has created a dhoom in the tinsel world with a string of hits and his sexy ’n’ sober looks. Saibal Chatterjee on the much-in-demand Abhishek Bachchan.

We are only halfway through 2005, but it is already abundantly clear that this is the year of Abhishek Bachchan. That is how dominant the young actor has been. The little B has discovered his sting.

Gone is the gawky, gangly, gravelly guy. AB Jr. is finally and deservedly on a roll. "The year has been wonderful," says Abhishek. That must surely be the understatement of the year.

It was Dhoom that triggered the long overdue upswing. Sanjay Gadhvi’s thriller was by no stretch of imagination a film that you would go miles to see unless you were enamoured of mean machines, but the perky potboiler possessed enough style and spunk on the surface to be able to draw urban moviegoers to the multiplexes.

Besides raking in big bucks for Yash Raj Films, Dhoom gave ‘flop actor’ Abhishek Bachchan the first bona fide box-office hit of his shaky career. Abhishek was far and away the best thing about the unabashedly derivative action flick.

It was indeed Abhishek who kept the film on track: his contribution was handsomely repaid in the form of both critical and commercial rewards. With his cool dude act as a no-nonsense policeman on the single-minded trail of a dangerous biker gang, he hit an impressively high note and leapfrogged overnight into the big league. He hasn’t looked back since.

The tide has clearly turned in his favour. His first two releases of 2005, Shaad Ali’s Bunty Aur Babli and Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar, which opened within a month of each other, have both hit the bull’s eye at the box office, strengthening Abhishek’s position as a saleable Bollywood star.

How life changes. Abhishek, who until last year had no clue what a hit film really looked and felt like, can now do no wrong anymore. Everything that he touches seems to turn to gold. And, significantly, he has the best of both worlds at his disposal — sprightly lead characters in conventional masala-laced entertainers like Dhoom and Bunty Aur Babli on the one hand and intense roles in offbeat songless dramas like Sarkar on the other.

One of Abhishek’s upcoming films is Antarmahal, a Bengali-language literary adaptation by Rituparno Ghosh. The film, co-starring Jackie Shroff, Soha Ali Khan and Raima Sen, is slated to be in the competition section of the Locarno Film Festival in early August.

From wowing the swelling ranks of his fans to silencing critics to reaching out to international film festivals, AB Jr. is a rare Bollywood actor who traverses the entire gamut. That is one significant respect in which he seems to have stolen a march over the redoubtable Amitabh Bachchan.

The young actor has deservedly garnered positive notice for his knockout performances in Bunty Aur Babli and Sarkar. In the former, he plays a wily small-town boy determined to make his pile of riches before it is too late. So he dons many chameleon-like garbs to hoodwink his victims and shake the law off his back.

The panache and effortless ease which he brought to the role are proof of his inherent acting prowess. Especially impressive is his impersonation of a paan-chewing, fast-talking Agra thug who sells the Taj Mahal to a White businessman who is too besotted with his girlfriend to realise that he is being taken for a ride.

The sequence brings to the fore Abhishek’s sense of comic timing — a trait that provides a wonderful contrast to the dominant acting mode — and his quiet confidence. What stands out above everything else in Bunty Aur Babli is the remarkable manner in which he holds his own in the presence of Amitabh, cast in the role of a scowling crime-buster in hot pursuit of the conman and his wife.

Abhishek repeats that difficult spectacle with even greater emphasis in Sarkar. Playing the son of a powerful underworld don (Amitabh Bachchan) who metes out justice to the downtrodden using his own rough and ready extra-constitutional methods, his character calls for subtlety and understated nuances. He pulls it off with amazing élan.

With Amitabh in remarkably fine fettle, Abhishek is obviously up against the stiffest competition that any contemporary Bollywood actor can encounter. Yet he makes a strong impact as an ingénue who is clearly an outsider — he returns from the US at the outset of the film to be by his ageing father’s side. He first watches from the sidelines as life unfolds in this nether world and then gradually picks up the ropes and asserts his authority over his father’s empire.

The jury is still out on the staying power of his latest release, Anubhav Sinha’s action-packed Dus, but Abhishek has once again attracted praise for his star turn in the multi-starrer. As a member of an anti-terrorist squad, he plays an action star with great aplomb. The intensity of his death scene in the film is reminiscent of the many similar screen moments that Amitabh immortalised.

The one crucial aspect of the ascent of Abhishek is that, while the hits took their time in coming, he managed to acquire the reputation of a quality screen performer without much ado. And that stemmed from his performances in two films that came unstuck at the box office but demonstrated to the world his ability to invest a character with a dimension entirely his own.

Mani Ratnam’s Yuva had Abhishek playing Lallan, a small-time Kolkata ruffian who is exploited brazenly by politicians and criminals alike. He captured the swagger, the nonchalance and the amoral core of the character with unwavering effect. It was a performance that seemed as effortless as it was stunning.

Abhishek followed that up in Ram Gopal Varma’s Naach with his sensitive interpretation of the character of a successful film actor at odds with his independent-minded girlfriend, a talented dancer who refuses to give in to the ways of the industry. Once again, Abhishek displayed a commendable sense of restraint and balance as an actor.

In purely cinematic terms, Naach must rank among the finest Bollywood films of recent years as much for its technical attributes as for the quality of the performances.

Masterly editing, a superb sound design and innovative camerawork make the Abhishek-Antara Mali-Ritesh Deshmukh starrer a treat to watch. What set the film apart are the characters. They belong to the world of showbiz and yet are completely believable and real.

The character played by Antara — Rewa, an aspiring choreographer, determined to make it on her own steam — is unlike that of any woman seen in popular Hindi movies. Abhishek’s character, Abhinav, with his honest yet vulnerable air, provides a perfect counterpoint to her.

It takes Abhinav, who fails to understand Rewa’s unwavering commitment to her values, a while to see the raging fire in her belly and the cool confidence in her eyes but he too, in one illuminating scene, goes down on his haunches and sits at her feet, his eyes transfixed on her face.

Never before in the annals of Hindi cinema has this sort of daring been shown by a filmmaker in the depiction of the man-woman relationship. And rarely had a pair of young actors captured the fine art of acting with such felicity. It is, therefore, easy to see why accolades from critics are coming Abhishek’s way in heaps.

By his own admission, Varma has grown up adoring Amitabh. So when he says that he thinks Abhishek is a better actor than his father, he could not be making that statement without good reason.

Needless to say, neither Abhishek nor Amitabh’s countless fans would agree with Ramu’s comparative assessment of the father and son, whom he cast as a team in the super-successful Sarkar.

But it is pretty obvious exactly what Ramu means: five years into his profession, Abhishek has demonstrated greater poise and confidence than Amitabh Bachchan did at the corresponding juncture of his illustrious career.

Moreover, it is apparent that Varma and Abhishek, with Naach and Sarkar behind them, share a comfort level that is conducive to outstanding work. The best of this director-actor combo is probably yet to come.

It is undeniable that Abhishek still has a long, long way to go to catch up with his father, but his journey is picking up momentum and he seems to be steadily emerging not only as a popular star endowed with an earthy sex appeal but also as one of the better Bollywood actors of his generation. Unlike many Bollywood stars of the day, he rarely plays himself on the screen; he sinks into the character.

When Abhishek made his debut in 2000 in J.P. Dutta’s Refugee, he was, much like his father at the outset of his career, a gawky young man groping for direction. In his debut performance, he did show flashes of talent and the famous brooding Bachchan intensity, but the film failed to woo the masses.

The false start was a huge setback that he took three years to shrug off.

The fact that Hrithik Roshan’s maiden film, Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai, which was designed as a launch pad for him by his doting father, Rakesh Roshan, was released the same year as Refugee led to unnecessary comparisons between the debutants.

The challenge before Abhishek was far greater than what Hrithik had to contend with. The latter had a tailor-made launch vehicle. Moreover, the weight of expectations on him wasn’t quite as great as it was on Abhishek.

Hrithik’s father was at best a middle-level former Bollywood star. Abhishek’s pa was the Big B himself, a movie icon far more luminous than any other in the Mumbai film industry. So every time Abhishek paraded across the screen, he was compared unfairly with his father. He naturally came up short.

He did not help his cause by choosing a string of wrong films. Instead of banking on his strength — his innate intensity — he sought to compete for the dancing, singing teen sensation slot with Hrithik.

The result was one disaster after another. Films like Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya, Dhai Akshar Prem Ke, Bas Itna Sa Khwaab Hai, Haan Maine Bhi Pyaar Kiya, Om Jai Jagdish, Shararat, Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost, and Kuch Na Kaho sank without a trace.

Ironically, one such commercial disaster, Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon, a messy love story in which director Sooraj Barjatya misguidedly sought to ape Karan Johar, allowed Abhishek to match skills with rival Hrithik Roshan and emerge the winner. It was the turning point of his career. The film bombed but his performance as a reticent, undemonstrative young man, pitted against Hrithik’s full-of-beans lover, struck a chord with the critics and a section of the audience.

Those who have been following Abhishek’s career over a period of time have always known that he is capable of delivering the goods. A combination of factors — the pressure of expectations, injudicious choice of films and plain bad luck — plagued the young actor in the first few years of his Bollywood trek. But post-Dhoom, the chhota B has acquired an unassailable position both as an actor who can melt hardened critics and a star, who can command a huge fan following.

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