Sayani Gupta would have missed out on her role alongside Shah Rukh Khan in Maneesh Sharma’s Fan . The casting team from Yash Raj Films had been trying to get in touch with her repeatedly on a number that she had stopped using. The message on Facebook stayed buried under a heap of unread ones, until one fine night she spotted it while clearing the inbox.
That all-important mail led to an audition call and finally the much-coveted role. But she can’t reveal any more. “I cannot say what I play in the film because that would mean revealing the plot. But obviously, the film is about Shah Rukh Khan, not me.”
The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) graduate caught the audience eye as Khanum, the visually challenged young activist and lover of the protagonist Laila (Kalki Koechlin) in Shonali Bose’s Margarita With A Straw (2014). She looks back at the film and her character as a benchmark of sorts. “No other film might feel as performative. You do not get a role like that every day.” She is unsure if Fan will be as crucial a film or if it will change her life. “But you never know; it just might because it is a big film.”
Quite clearly, it’s not the Hindi mainstream cinema but the independent, niche films that have been Gupta’s comfort zone. She confesses to being used to working on projects that have been more about the script and less about the stars. No wonder Fan proved to be a radically different experience, one which she is still in the process of getting around.
Quite evidently, with training at FTII behind her, she is trying to negotiate mainstream Hindi cinema with care and caution.
But at the same time, she is unequivocal when it comes to one of its superstars, the “witty and magnetic” Shah Rukh Khan. “It is quite insane for any human being to constantly have this energy. He takes it upon himself to entertain everyone. He does not let anyone have a dull moment.”
Her own favourite SRK films — Aziz Mirza’s Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992) and Kundan Shah’s Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994) — belong to a time when he was hardly the superstar he is now. “Those were quieter films. He was much more uncorrupted back then.” What she likes about Fan is that it is not the usual SRK film. “He is not into the usual mannerisms. It is quite outstanding what one actor has been able to do in two very different roles.”
Ask Gupta who she is a fan of and the names of a host of international filmmakers pour out: Wong Kar Wai, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ingmar Bergman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Robert Bresson and Wes Anderson. Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) and In The Mood For Love (2000) are among her all-time favourite films. She dreams of working with him some day. “I love the way he sees his characters, the way he cuts a scene, the production design of his films.”
Her biggest discomfort with mainstream Hindi films is the male gaze. “There are very few people who write women characters with a soul. The roles written for women are mostly skeletons, because the men writing these characters haven’t bothered enough to understand their experiences.”
She has preferred acting in independent films and shorts, most of them made by women. They have been doing the rounds of film festivals but haven’t got theatrical releases yet.
In Payal Sethi’s Leeches (2016), working on which proved to be an intense experience for Gupta, she plays Raisa, an 18-year-old poor Muslim girl in Hyderabad, whose mute, virgin sister is going to be sold off to a sheikh for a night. Raisa wants to trade places with her, but she has a boyfriend and is not a virgin herself. This is when she learns about the traditional practice of women inserting leeches into their vagina to cause bleeding while having sex.
She describes Leena Yadav’s Parched (2015) as “a chick flick set in a village in Kutch.” She plays Champa, a woman who is trying to get by and live on despite being battered and bruised. There is Anubhuti Kashyap’s Call Waiting (2016) about a girl’s wandering mind as she waits for a phone call from a boy. Rukhsana Tabassum’s Bubbles and Stars (2014) is about the interaction between two characters during the interval of a play.
Her next commercial film is also by a woman filmmaker. Baar Baar Dekho is a Karan Johar-Ritesh Sidhwani-Farhan Akhtar co-production, with Katrina Kaif and Siddharth Malhotra in the lead.
It is being directed by debutante Nitya Mehra, who assisted Ang Lee in Life of Pi (2012) and Mira Nair in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). Another film and role about which Gupta says she can’t give away anything.
The author is a freelance writer
“I cannot say what I play in the
film because that
would mean
revealing the plot”
