Darshana, the Action Heroine

An undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Lady Shri Ram College, a Financial Economics degree from City University, London, and a four-year stint with the Institute of Financial Management and Research in Chennai are not things you see in the biodata of an actor but Darshana Rajendran, the breakout star of Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey did all that before deciding she would have a career in cinema. Now 34, she is enjoying the acclaim coming her way, with women in the audience roaring with approval at the way her character, Jaya, responds to the physical abuse from her husband, Rajesh, played by actor-director Basil Joseph. Growing up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, she was surrounded by dance and the arts but never thought she’d be in the movies. Now based in Ernakulam, she has starred in a series of well-received movies, from C U Soon (2020) to Dear Friend (2022). She has a long list of directors she wants to work with, many of whom she has already ticked off, and is excited to be in an industry where it is easier to make the transition from character actor to leading lady. In Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, she plays a young woman who marries a poultry-farm owner on the condition he will ‘allow’ her to complete her graduation. He doesn’t keep his word and instead starts to physically assault her repeatedly, apologising every time and trying to make up with a movie and meal out. Twenty-one slaps in six months, Jaya tells her family and counting. She retaliates finally, and how. Suffice it to say that Darshana spent two months learning martial arts for the role, of which one was spent in bed with a sprained ankle. “It’s not a story I haven’t heard before either with friends or family, and it is such a trope in Malayalam cinema where the woman is always schooled with a slap that when we heard the audience clapping for the girl hitting back during the first day, first show at Vanitha-Veneetha Cineplex in Kochi, we knew it was a small revolution,” she says. Women felt seen, several would pull her aside to tell her their story, and many would come and just hold her hand. Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (now on Disney+Hotstar) is a triumph.

The Independent Mr Deol

Abhay Deol, who returns to streaming in the New Year with a big-ticket series, has been in movies that have raised the bar for Bollywood. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) was a stinging satire on middle-class acquisitiveness, while Dev.D, a year later, was a calling out of male chauvinism. In fact, originally, says Deol, when he took the idea to director Anurag Kashyap, he wanted to make Chandramukhi’s character a pricey East European who had no compunction doing her job and didn’t fall into the stereotype of the prostitute with a heart of gold. It didn’t happen but Deol continued to make artistically and commercially wise choices with movies such as Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), where he played a young man stifled by his upper-middle-class existence, or Aanand L Rai’s Raanjhanaa (2013), where he was a rabble-rousing student leader. Did Bollywood fail him? Deol believes that the marketing machine of the film industry conflates endorsements with movie successes. Box-office success is not enough; it has to translate into endorsements and red-carpet appearances. Deol, whose uncle is the actor Dharmendra, believed in maintaining the mystique of a star, which Bollywood thinks is the equivalent of being invisible. “I was taking artistic chances,” he says now, “but for Hindi cinema, it is a business first and creative medium, second. Maybe, I was too left-of-centre and extremely idealistic.” But 17 years later, he is still standing, with a new series Trial by Fire, awaiting release on Netflix. Here, he plays Shekhar Krishnamoorthy, husband of Neelam, and father of Unnati and Ujjwal, who lost their lives in the Uphaar fire in Delhi in 1997. “When I began in Hindi cinema, I was uncompromising. I was doing cinema that was going against the grain, trying to create a new, alternative scene.” Some vestiges of it are still around, even if mostly on streaming. So, did Bollywood fail him, I ask again? No, he says. “We manifest our own lives by our actions.”

Scene and Heard

Variety’s first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time is out. Guess which is the only Indian film to figure in it? Yes, Pather Panchali (1955), Satyajit Ray’s humanist document that “put Indian cinema on the international art-house map.” But it’s at a disappointing number—55—in a list topped by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960s “slasher masterpiece” Psycho.

Abhay DeolBollywoodcinemaDarshana RajendranSatyajit Ray