To the camera born

Sensuous, sensitive and spontaneous, Vidya Balan never ceases to surprise. Regarded as every thinking man’s woman, she is the only true ‘star’ actor in Hindi cinema today, writes Derek Bose

She is a beautiful 20-something living in Mumbai. Her mother tongue is Tamil but her roots are in Kerala. She began her acting career with a Bengali film and is, at present, the diva in demand in Bollywood.

Her name is Vidya Balan. She has the most expressive eyes in the Hindi film industry and a smile to die for. She loves chocolates and has a healthy drink of coconut water at least once a day. She loves listening to Shubha Mudgal, Pandit Jasraj and the Gundecha Brothers, and is a fan of George Clooney.

All that is incidental. The Vidya Balan we know is Jhanvi; the radio jockey Sanjay Dutt loses his heart to in Raj Kumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munnabhai. She started as Lolita, Saif Ali Khan’s love interest in Pradeep Sarkar’s adaptation of the Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Parineeta. Then came Vidya as Meenakshi Gupta in Mani Ratnam’s Guru – a role that saw her getting almost sidelined by the high-profile lead pair of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai. In Nikhil Advani’s Salaam-e-Ishq, she and John Abraham were paired as a Hindu-Muslim couple in a story of six couples battling with their demons of love. Thereafter, she emerged as Saif’s childhood love, Rajjo, in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s costume drama, Ekalavya, soon to be followed by two brainless comedies with Akshay Kumar — Sajid Khan’s Heyy Babyy and Priyadarshan’s Bhool Bhulaiya. And then came that powerful though under-rated, role of Sneha, the neglected wife of the hero, Ajay Devgan, in Rajkumar Santoshi’s Halla Bol.

In her recent release, Kismat Konnection Vidya plays romantic foil to Shahid Kapoor, an architect with brilliant academic credentials but professionally, a non-starter. They meet when he offers to save her community centre from certain destruction and, thereafter, lady luck smiles on him. From the tough-talking, no-nonsense girl, Vidya turns into a romantic idealist, allowing destiny to take its own course. Her soul mate, by then, is already climbing the ladder of success.

These nine films broadly sum up an impressive, though brief career, of just three years since Vidya made her Bollywood debut. None of these films have anything in common in terms of theme, treatment, characterisation, dramatic structure or directorial style. Unlike her contemporaries Bipasha Basu, Priyanka Chopra, Kangana Ranaut and others who have been religiously repeating themselves in film after film – if only to reinforce their star image – Vidya has refrained from being typecast. She has been taking her chances, showcasing her versatility and has unfailingly left a lasting impression with each of her nine films. In that sense, Vidya is the only true ‘star-actress’ we have in Hindi cinema today.

There is a 10th film also – Gautam Halder’s Bhalo Theko — in Bengali. In this film, she plays Anandi, daughter of a cultured, politically-conscious family living in a Kolkata suburb. The role of a young woman with an interest in poetry and betrayed in love provides a glimpse of Vidya’s prodigious talent – more so, when she had to hold her own against the redoubtable Soumitra Chatterjee, playing her uncle. This is an extraordinary film, being the only one in Vidya’s career to be based on a strong female-oriented theme. Parineeta may have been another, in which she had exhibited the same flashes of brilliance that landed her, deservingly, with an armful of awards. Sadly, after that, she has had to settle for films that qualitatively could not match the standards of Bhalo Theko and Parineeta, nor challenge her acting skills in any substantive manner.

So what makes Vidya different from other top-ranking Bollywood heroines?

Apart from consistently reinventing herself with every film, what stands out clearly is her ability to make the most of her femininity rather than use glamour as a vehicle of success. Unlike the rest who are all too anxious to flaunt their bikinis and gym-toned bodies, Vidya has furthered her sex appeal by allowing the camera to dwell on the softness of her facial features, whether it is an intense drama like Parineeta or Halla Bol, a flippant Heyy Babyy or a feel-good romance like Lage Raho Munnabhai or Kismat Konnection. She understands that there is more sensuousness in a suggestive gesture or a glance than in needless show of skin. Little wonder, she is regarded as a thinking man’s woman.

The second striking aspect about Vidya is her instinctive sensibility while coming to grips with the demands of her role. Her intelligence and in-born skills of slipping into the skin of a character make her a director’s delight. For instance, while playing the schizophrenic in Bhool Bhulaiya, Vidya had absolutely no brief from the film’s director in assuming the persona of Manjulika. She played it by the ear, particularly in the last 20 minutes of the film, and virtually walked away with the film.

Again, in the multi-starrer Salaam-e-Ishq, she is pitted against a bevy of big names playing couples in love — Anil Kapoor-Juhi Chawla, Salman Khan-Priyanka Chopra, Akshaye Khanna-Ayesha Takia. All of them enjoy roughly the same screen time, but it is Vidya (playing a Muslim woman, Tehzeeb Hussain), with John Abraham (as a Hindu), who stand out as the most credible couple. Only total identification with her character could have made that possible.

The third and most important attribute of Vidya is her ability to hold a close-up with complete confidence. This is a rare skill that comes from intuitively engaging with the camera on the one hand and being in total command of her expressions — something that seasoned artistes of the calibre of Merryl Streep and Jessica Lange have been able to master. As an untrained actress, for Vidya, to thus manipulate the camera to her advantage is no mean feat. (The current crop of glamour girls would rather go for wide-angle or mid-long shots). The slight flicker of her eyelashes, tentative twitches of facial muscles and that look of love and longing, which cinematographers have celebrated in film after film with lingering close-ups bear testimony to this. Today, if Vidya is seen to be at once expressive, intense, sensuous, sensitive, enigmatic and spontaneous, it is because she has mastered the art of wooing the camera.

Indeed, this is one artiste who does not cease to surprise. She may be a bad judge when it comes to signing films. She does not come from a film background. She lacks the savvy to promote herself. She does not belong to any of the Bollywood camps. She does not even have a smashing hit like Om Shanti Om in her kitty. But all this does not take away the passion with which she pursues her craft setting the screen on fire with the flutter of her eyelids and smile.

Above all, Vidya never disappoints.