Almost a decade ago, a seemingly plain-faced 19-year-old girl made her debut as a Hindi film actress. Her male co-star: a 41-year-old superstar. In her first film, she played the role of a 19-year-old Indian girl navigating the circumstantial angst of an arranged marriage with this older simpleton. It was a complex part: a stay-at-home wife forced to simultaneously grieve and grow, abandon and embrace, be young while growing old.
At two separate points in Aditya Chopra’s Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi , Anushka Sharma expressed the kind of ‘vivid’ — this adjective will be a recurring one — range of emotions one routinely associates with a small-town teenager forced to mature too soon. And not just in reel life.
The first involves her being a classic martyr: she resists her natural instincts and rebuffs her suitor (who is, in keeping with Bollywood’s penchant for elevated symbolism, actually her needy husband in disguise) moments after he confesses his love for her. She wears a face of distress, telling him that she cannot cheat on the noble man she has come to owe so much to. Her tone assumes the muted desperation of a plea. Her brow furrows a little. Her wide lips curl into a mild frown. Eyes fixed blankly on him; she makes sure she communicates her ‘deadness inside’ with this facial symphony of practiced downcast-ness. She recites her mental state with an expository fluidity, instead of the usual stuttering and stammering that characterises younger reactions.
In the second instance, she berates her husband for being a foolhardy hero while trying to impress her. “Don’t give me so much that I can’t pay you back” is her loud, quasi-aggressive plea, designed as a heightened version of her ‘sacrificial’ face. She resents him for being a nice guy instead of a patriarchal douchebag. This tone is affecting, sad, ugly even, a very human reaction that would form the early foundation of Sharma’s trademark ‘Angry Young Woman’ avatar. We notice her range here: the sheer distance between the broadness of her smile from a few scenes ago and the seriousness of her scowl is, for lack of a suitable term, vivid. Flamboyant, almost. It felt strangely novel to see a newcomer put her heart on a plate, without getting overawed, opposite an actor whose pokerfaced-ness lent her newness a kind of outlined gravitas.
This semi-confrontational confidence, in both sadness and happiness, in sacrifice and rage, became an on-screen constant as her career chugged along. But it didn’t take one long to note that, as a relative outsider to the industry, much like Kangana Ranaut, she occasionally tends to overplay the intensity of these two disparate faces. She has worked with a bucket-list of sought-after directors, from Vishal Bhardwaj to Anurag Kashyap to Rajkumar Hirani to Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar. Yet, at the risk of sounding critical, she doesn’t quite boast of the versatility that comes with a decade of adhering to different visions. Her definitive performances, in fact, have come in films made by lesser-known directors: Navdeep Singh’s NH10 and then first-timer Maneesh Sharma’s Band Baaja Baarat . There’s a natural ‘woman in a man’s world’ fire in her eyes, which is perfect for these two films, or even the gender-popcorning Sultan , but becomes ill-placed and too much of an “act” in traditionally softer dramas like Jab Tak Hain Jaan, Dil Dhadakne Do and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil .
For instance, contrast her annoyingly saccharine turn as third wheel Akira Rai in Yash Chopra’s Jab Tak Hai Jaan , to a similar performance by Karishma Kapoor in the director’s 1997 hit, Dil Toh Pagal Hai . Both of them are destined to be victims of unrequited love, and both must sportily smile their way out of their friend-zoned shackles cast by Shah Rukh Khan’s dimples. Yet when Sharma smiles, it’s clear that she is putting it on, and not just as that character. The ‘effort’ is visible, the drama not impulsive enough. Like a straitjacketed action hero starved of the action part. Like an athlete forced to be an accountant.
It’s another matter that when heroines play such roles here, they must remain dignified and quietly sacrifice their feelings at the altar of the more cinematic love stories of the triangle, as compared to the ‘entertaining’ instability of spurned male characters. Take the bland submissiveness of cases such as the tomboyish Kajol in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai , Kareena Kapoor in Mujhse Dosti Karoge , Rani Mukherjee in Har Dil Jo Pyaar Karega (comatose, literally) and Illeana D’Cruz in Barfi! as compared to, say, the melodramatic meat afforded to a Ranbir Kapoor in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Saawariya , Suniel Shetty in Dhadkan , Saif Ali Khan in Kal Ho Naa Ho and Salman Khan in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam . And within these stifling Bollywood-template limitations, a free-flowing Anuskha Sharma is a bit of a misfit. We aren’t yet quite as progressive as new-age Hindi cinema would like to have us believe, and Sharma’s knee-jerk, territorial progressiveness as a non-star-child is, ironically in this universe, an artistic shortcoming. She drifts in and out of her comfort zones — uncomfortable in context of the ‘heroine mandate’ — even within the same film.
Only one of her two moments acquires the honesty of an artiste: her mandatory snarling outbursts directed at men in the films, not her persona-defying acts of unconditional generosity. Unlike Karishma’s dreamy-eyed ’90s-independent-woman filminess, her assertive voice doesn’t know where to go when she is supposed to flash a showy half-smile to indicate loss and the ability to take this loss in her submissive stride. Consequentially, in Jab Tak Hai Jaan , the camera often lingers on her even when nobody else is in the frame, forcing her to physically voice her thoughts to the audience — a benign sign of showmanship more suited to old-fashioned villains than benevolent supporting actresses. This glassy-eyed, Raj-Kapoor-ish “the show must go on” grin returns in the final act of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil , when she must fuel Ranbir’s angst by being the fake-happy cancer patient. And even in Bombay Velvet , where she is devised as a servile cabaret singer to counter her firebrand machismo-squaring reputation.
While her willingness to experiment can be lauded, it isn’t the same as evolution, because when not equipped with an attitude that resolves on its own terms, Sharma often becomes that over-sincere student caught between an urge to fit in and a desire to break away. She goes from 0 to 100 and back, as is evident from her strong, invariably obvious displays of conventional emotions. As a result, these roles become modern imitations, vaudeville extensions of what she perhaps perceives the seasoned mainstream enthusiast to accept. When, in fact, the choices of her production house ( NH10 , the upcoming Phillauri ) demonstrate an originality she may always strive to work toward.
In a recent episode of Koffee with Karan , it was somewhat surprising to see her as a reserved person prone to bouts of ‘spacing out’. Yet, it isn’t. Because such minds wake up really hard when “action” is called, almost with an overbearing jolt, and the result is Sharma’s graphically expressive first innings: a nostril-flaring specialist merely filling others’ space, instead of creating her own solar system. Yet, she consistently remains closest to the sun.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
