Post by michelle on Jun 30, 2006 21:17:05 GMT
A five-year break can cause an awful lot of rustiness – especially if one happens to be a mainstream Bollywood actress. But Kajol is clearly made of sterner stuff.
The runaway box office success of her comeback vehicle, Kunal Kohli’s Fanaa, and the rave reviews garnered by Kajol have catapulted the gifted Kajol back to where she has always belonged. That’s a rare feat indeed: Mumbai screen actresses are not known to storm back after marriage and motherhood as emphatically as Kajol has done.
Fanaa was always going to be a special film, what with Aamir Khan and Kajol teaming up on screen for the first time ever. Seeing the screen chemistry that they work up, one can only hope that this isn’t the last time!
Matching a star-actor of the calibre of Aamir scene for scene, emotion for emotion can’t be easy, but Kajol has, as only she can, come tantalisingly close to doing that in Fanaa. Spontaneity is her principal strength. Aamir, in contrast, is a student of the craft of acting; he develops every on-screen moment and situation with the aid of his mind. Kajol is all heart. Together, they form an awesome screen pair.
Even critics who haven’t exactly gone gaga over Fanaa have been unstinted in their praise for Kajol’s outstanding performance as Zooni, a blind Kashmiri girl who falls in love with a philandering tour guide only to have her life singed beyond recognition by the anger that simmers in the heart of the man.
Two of Kajol’s major contemporaries, Karisma Kapoor and Raveena Tandon, who made their acting debuts roughly around the same time as she did in the early 1990s, have faded into oblivion following marriage. Kajol, in fine fettle, marches on.
When Kajol decided to take a break from the hurly-burly after marrying Ajay Devgan in 1999, there was an understandable outbreak of speculation over her future plans. Was she going to call it a day? Now, a baby girl later, Kajol, a fourth-generation actress, is back at the top of the heap, a slot that her cousin, Rani Mukherjee, has been eyeing for quite a while now.
Of course, the numbers game has never really mattered to Kajol. Even when she rode high on the string of super-duper hits that she delivered in the company of Bollywood’s undisputed box office badshah, Shah Rukh Khan, she publicly pooh-poohed the idea of being the Bollywood Queen Bee. Kajol is a natural.
Nowhere is that more evident than in her on-screen partnership with Shah Rukh, which, as we all know, has assumed legendary proportions thanks to films like Baazigar, Karan Arjun, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Kuch Kuch Hota and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Kajol’s last release before she went into semi retirement. The question may be inaudible at the moment, but it is in the heart of every movie fan: will the force of pure commercial logic bring the two stars back together on screen in the near future?
Such was the power of Kajol’s K3G performance that she left her fans and Bollywood honchos craving for a return show. The Karan Johar-directed family drama had a top-heavy cast – Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh, Hrithik Roshan, Kareena Kapoor and Jaya Bachchan – but Kajol not only held her own, she also stole much of the thunder from the megastars.
Playing a loquacious Old Delhi girl whose marriage triggers a bitter fissure between the patriarch of a conservative family and his son, she lit up the screen with her electrifying vivacity.
The dominant flavour in Fanaa is completely different. Kajol taps into her understated sensuality and her modulated intensity to provide the perfect foil to the many moods that Aamir exudes in the film. Not in a single frame of Fanaa does Kajol betray any telltale signs that she was away from the arclights for half a decade. She looks more stunning than she has ever done in her career.
For Kajol fans, Fanaa is the beginning of a new innings. It is great news particularly because it indicates the possibility of her career moving in a new direction. While the likes of Raveena, Karisma and even Rani have occasionally ventured into off-mainstream filmmaking territory with the aim to grow as actresses, Kajol has so far chosen to confine herself to big-budget commercial Mumbai cinema. Fanaa, too, is a Yashraj Films product, but the nature of the role that she plays in the film points to an urge on Kajol’s part to sink her teeth into something far deeper than what mainstream Hindi cinema has hitherto offered her.
For Kajol and her countless fans the going can only get better from here on.
-Saibal Chatterjee, June 13, 2006
