Back in the day, a veteran editor used to have a sharp observation about the phenomenon of actors being showered with acclaim for a very average performance. “Too many people,” he’d rue, “mistake the role for the performance.”
Never were truer words spoken. Even today, despite the general increase in cinema literacy, separating an interesting or powerful part from the actor’s rendition of it is something few are able to do. I’m not singling out Varun Dhawan for this, but his turn in Badlapur is one of the more recent examples — the lead role, noir as they come, was a gripping one but the actor was clearly out of his depth except in the light-hearted portions. Yet, the performance was lavished with praise.
Dramatic high jinks
The mistaking-role-for-performance syndrome sprang to mind again last fortnight when Akshay Kumar was declared the best actor at the National Film Awards for Rustom. True, there was criticism — as well as accusations of favoritism flung at the jury chairperson Priyadarshan — but there were people who genuinely believed that Kumar had done a great job in the film. I have no idea why, but I’m guessing it was because of the role itself — its narrative centrality and its inherent drama which were interpreted as marvellous acting.
How does one evaluate a performance? While it’s not rocket science — as audience members, we instinctively know a truly good performance when we see one — there’s one detail that people unfamiliar with film-making miss out on. Namely: unlike theatre acting, where the performer is, in a sense, naked before the audience, film acting can be manipulated up to a point and made to look better than it is.
Many years ago, that very talented film-maker Vijay Anand gave an example of this in an interview. Anand, who was as close to being an auteur as possible in the Bollywood set-up — he wrote, directed and edited his own films – spoke of a scene in his Tere Mere Sapne , where Hema Malini was supposed to break down. Outspoken as always, the film-maker had declared that there was no chance of the actress being able to do this convincingly, and so he had her open a fridge, look inside and sob. No camera on the face, no incompetent acting on screen — voila, as simple as that.
Help at hand
Sadly, there isn’t a fridge handy for every inept actor to bung his or her head into, but there are other smart ways of photoshopping a performance. Lighting and clever shot breakdown have been known to come to the director’s rescue when an actor is unable to emote — a dramatically lit close-up with one glycerine-induced teardrop trickling down the cheek, for instance, saves the director the trouble of trying to coax an expression out of his actor and makes the audience go, Wah, kya acting hai ! I remember a couple of early shots from Rustom — where Akshay Kumar was clearly unable to summon up the required expressions of pain and betrayal — taking recourse to this. Years ago, an art film, I forget which one now, also employed this ruse when an actress was unable to do an emotional scene — it was shot mostly in arty darkness and the actress finally buried her face in her hands, allowing only the sound of the sobs to emanate. Sadly, those too had zero depth.
If the director/cinematographer can camouflage flaws, it’s the editor who’s the ultimate makeover artiste — s/he fixes a bad performance by painstakingly choosing the best take, cutting it at the proper moment, juxtaposing it with other shots at weak points and so on. Even the most talented actors are helped immensely by a good editor who can shape their performance and give it coherence in its final form. An article I read three years ago in Hollywood magazine Variety spoke about how it was no coincidence that the nominations for the acting and editing awards in that year’s Oscars overlapped; I’m not sure this has ever applied to Bollywood but it’s an interesting point.
The lack of awareness of such technicalities leads most — I wouldn’t say all — people to have a less judicious view of a film performance. The difference between a good actor who is capable of enacting, say, a long emotional dialogue in savage close-up in one shot and a mediocre one who can only do it in bits and parts, long shots and artfully lit close-ups is lost on them. In the darkness of the cinema hall, half the movie is constructed in your head anyway — and when you see an author-backed role that grips you, you tend to assume that the actor in it (especially if you’re a fan of his) is responsible.
Blind to detail
There are very many examples of blindness to mediocre or bad acting but one of the more glaring ones was in Neerja, a film on a real-life braveheart who died rescuing the passengers on her plane from a terrorist hijack. In a situation as terrifying as this, you’d think care would be taken to see that the junior artistes, a substantial part of the film, had the appropriate expressions of fear/horror/anxiety on their faces or at least that their acting incapability would be duly camouflaged. For some reason it wasn’t. The kindergarten-level emoting was right there on screen – some artistes tried and failed miserably, some were poker-faced, some even looked happy. And yet, in the general gush about the film, no one seemed to mind, or perhaps even notice, this.
With audiences who are as forgiving and/or clueless, actors, mostly lead ones, often get much more credit for a meaty, author-backed role than they deserve. On the other hand, there are also those who lift a very ordinary part with the sheer weight of their performance. But that’s a subject for another column.
