Leading Ladies

There was a surreal moment on the set of Amazon Prime Video’s new movie, Jalsa. Vidya Balan was in the room with Shefali Shah and Rohini Hattangadi. “Shefali is someone whom I have deeply admired and Rohini’s range is just amazing, from Gandhi (1982) to Saaransh (1984) to ChaalBaaz (1989). And I had to remind myself to focus on the job at hand. Initially we were all groping. The first take was just not working and I remember telling the director the sur (tone) was all off,” says Balan.

However, there are practically no false notes in her performance as Maya Menon, the upright and some­what smug digital news star who gets involved in a hit and run, or in those of Shefali Shah who plays her cook-cum-nanny, Ruksana, and Rohini Hattangadi who plays her mother Rukmini. It is a rare film, powered by not merely these three women, but by a fourth as well, the wide-eyed yet street-smart reporter fresh out of Kerala, trying to make it in big, bad Mumbai, played by young Vidhatri Bandi. “There was a day when I saw Vidya, Shefali and Rohini on set, and I thought, I might as well go home,” says Suresh Triveni, who directed and co-wrote the film. “What can you tell them to do, that they don’t know,” he says of his “rock stars”.

“They’re invested in the film, which means they will work and they will make you work,” he says. He compares them to star students who make you believe they haven’t prepared for an exam but then ace it. “Their process is similar and yet dissimilar. Shefali will text you before the shoot and say she doesn’t know what she is going to do, and Vidya will call you and say, ‘Listen…,’ and you know there’s something work­ing in her brain. Both of them ask lots of questions, which can range from the painting on the wall behind them, to their walk, to their breath,” he adds.

It is almost incidental that Balan is 43, Shah will turn 50 this year and Hattangadi will be 67 this April. Age has never been kind to women of talent in the world of entertainment. But now change is afoot. Triveni wrote Jalsa keeping his lead women actors in mind. Female actors are now playing characters they never dreamed would be written, like the morally ambigu­ous Maya Menon, who is the heroine and yet not dipped in sugar and spice. Or they’re playing characters they’ve seen and heard of, like Raveena Tandon, who has found many women like her Aranyak character Kasturi Dogra during her travels—the typical policewoman who is assertive but remains feminine, with her bindis and little gold earrings. “Whenever I meet them, say at the airport, I ask them about their life and they invariably talk about the pressure at home to quit their work and start their families,” she says.

Much of the change has to do with streaming services, which have altered the game for female actors, says Aysha Viswamohan, professor at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. “From Sanya Malhotra in Pagglait (2021) to Fatima Sana Shaikh in Ludo (2020), OTTs are providing our heroines the platform to grapple with deliciously unconven­tional roles. And look how they have brought the spotlight on the Golden Girls: Raveena Tandon, Manisha Koirala, Shefali Shah, Neena Gupta, and others. It was such a pleasure to get reacquainted with the absolutely gorgeous Pooja Bhatt in Bombay Begums,” she says.

They are also breaking the long-held myth in Bollywood and elsewhere that two women actors cannot share the screen without a catfight. “It’s just bullshit,” says Shah, in her direct manner, with a laugh. “I don’t think it was ever true.” Be that as it may these were the staples of the showbiz magazines of the ’80s and ’90s, when women like Sridevi were pitted against Madhuri Dixit. There would be full spreads on the awkward­ness between Karisma Kapoor and Raveena Tandon, or the cold war between Sridevi and Jaya Prada. Tandon speculates it was mostly because film magazine editors of that time were almost all women and almost always in love with the male star. And it helped the men to be portrayed as the object of attention of two desirable women, says Tandon.

Samantha Ruth Prabhu, who recently wrapped up Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal with Nayanthara and Vijay Sethupathi, admits she was some­what influenced by that old-fashioned notion that two women stars could not get equal screen time, especially as the movie was directed by Nayanthara’s partner Vignesh Shivan. “I find it very amusing to see two-heroine films where the women never meet each other. In other people’s minds, two heroines in one film are always supposed to be in competition, tearing each other’s hair out, but Vignesh and Nayanthara kept their promise to me. I have an equal role and am in every scene with Nayanthara. It was so liberating,” she says.

It helps that writers’ rooms are now packed with women, and the sets have many more women than in the past. The rules of the game have changed too. No longer can directors get away with the kind of obvious body-shaming that was par for the course earlier. As Neena Gupta recounts in her memoir, Sach Kahun Toh, she was asked to enhance her bosom for the song ‘Choli ke Peeche’ in Khalnayak (1993) because she was considered too flat chested. Or as Mita Vashisht said recently, she was once asked to change the dress she had got made for her role as an MTV veejay in Taal (1999) because she looked “sexier” than the heroine, Aishwarya Rai.

Such behaviour would now be called out in public, and if not, would certainly be remarked upon in private by women who are more confident and assertive. Whether it is Priyanka Chopra Jonas who mocked a news report for seeing her merely as Nick Jonas’ wife or Deepika Padukone who countered a snarky social media influencer for commenting on the length of her dress being inversely proportional to the frequency of her pro­motions for Gehraiyaan, women in the movies refuse to play along any more.

Part of the reason is the longevity of women actors. No longer are they con­sidered replaceable. As film producer Tanuj Garg says, “There used to be much talk about the short shelf lives of female actors. That ended with Dimple Kapadia and Hema Malini debunking the norm. Our cinema has been woman-centric ever since the halcyon days of Mother India (1957).” Somewhere in the 1970s, it changed, but with OTT booming and a new wave of cinema taking precedence, women characters have swiftly come to the fore. He adds, “Remarkably, age for the protagonist is no longer a factor, be it Madhuri Dixit, Tabu, Vidya Balan or Raveena Tandon. Thankfully the age­ism prejudice is done and dusted with.”

As is the fixation with catering to the male star, who is trapped in his own gilded cage, desperate to retain his youthful image with actresses much younger than them, whether it is Salman Khan with Disha Patani in Radhe: Your Most Wanted Bhai (2021) or Akshay Kumar with Kriti Sanon in Bachchan Pandey.

A Netflix spokesman says it is encouraging to see female storytellers come forward to tell more women-centric stories that spark conversations about the evolving role of women, not just in entertainment but in the world around us. So whether it is the character Vartika Chaturvedi in Delhi Crime (2019, soon to be seen in season 2) or Kasturi Dogra in Aranyak, women are leading stories. In Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein, the woman subverts the gender dynamic in a romance and in The Fame Game, the female star is portrayed as an ageless diva. Little wonder then that the OTT platform has more than 15 female-forward titles slated for 2022 including Mai, Monica, O My Darling, Masaba Masaba Season 2, Mismatched Season 2, She Season 2, Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives Season 2, etc.

The arrival of premium streaming series has helped showcase the ensem­ble cast with the script as the hero/hero­ine, says Sameer Nair, CEO of Applause Entertainment, a production house that has made Rudra: The Edge of Darkness, Mithya, and Call My Agent. “This has allowed creators to give all actors of all ages and genders an opportunity to land central and significant parts in series and in movies. It is also a statement on the kind of content we are now making, that relies more on story and storytell­ing and less on ‘star cast’,” he says.

Ditto with Amazon Prime Video which has an extraordinary cast of female collaborators, led by its head of India originals, Aparna Purohit. Whether it is Jalsa, or Balan’s Sherni (2021) and Shakuntala Devi (2020), or Jyothika’s Ponmagal Vandhal (2020) or Bhumi Pednekar’s Durgamati (2020), they are creating a female-first universe. Added to that are Four More Shots Please!, soon to have its third season, and Made in Heaven, which will air its second season. Both are produced and directed by women—Rangita Pritish Nandy and Anu Menon and Nupur Asthana for the former, and Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti for the latter. Zee5, which has run shows such as Mithya, Kaun Banegi Shikharwati and Rashmi Rocket, is look­ing to premiere shows such as Duranga and Saas Bahu Aachar Pvt Ltd etc.

Stories are being conceived with particular women in mind. If Triveni wrote Jalsa as a two-hander with Shah and Balan, then Rahul Sadasivan wrote Bhoothakalam, the chilling Malayalam horror film, with Revathi at its heart. “I didn’t have anyone else but Revathi ma’am in mind,” says Sadasivan. “I’m a big fan. She has decades of fine acting behind her. Getting her to do the role of Asha was a dream come true. I wanted the central character to be the mother and the son. That’s how I narrated the story to her, I had to convince her that it was not merely a horror film but at the heart of it was the mother-son relationship and how something as simple as love could overcome everything.”

The upshot is that these talented women are finally doing back-to-back movies, so much so that Suresh Triveni could only squeeze in two narrations for Shah who is making up for time she lost in the prime of her youth because Bollywood saw her as “too old” after she played Amitabh Bachchan’s wife and Akshay Kumar’s mother in Vipul Shah’s Waqt: The Race Against Time (2005). Revathi is juggling between her roles as actor and director. Aditi Rao Hydari has to now choose carefully between films in the south and in Bollywood, with the latter finally offering her roles worthy of her talent, including Vikramaditya Motwane’s upcoming series Stardust where she plays a character loosely based on Devika Rani, Indian cinema’s first female studio head. Women in leading acting and production roles will hopefully become a norm rather than an exception.