Heroine
Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Year: 2012
Duration: 150 minutes
Music: Salim Merchant
Rating: 6.0
This is an off-beat
Bollywood film that would have almost worked better as a parallel film. The
musical interludes are well done but interrupt a personal and emotional drama
that makes you feel like an intruder. It is a peek into Bollywood behind the
scenes and it isn't pretty. Petty rivalries, insults thrown like grenades,
rumors spread like a virus, everyone happy to step over or on another actor
to get ahead. Smiling to their public, looking glamorous for the constant
paparazzi who are like flies on the wall while either seething inside or gloating
outside and wanting only to stab someone in the back. You are only as popular
as your last film was successful and with a few of those bombs you begin
getting desperate as people stop returning your calls. I am not sure I liked
this film, but it pulled me in. Maybe too real? Way too melodramatic? Too
long at 150 minutes? I don't know but watching the many ups and downs
of one actress as she often self-destructs over a few years is at times hard
to watch and eventually exhausting. The film doesn't even try to make her
sympathetic - more that she is emblematic of an industry that welcomes you
in and then takes more pleasure in tossing you out. Everybody lives in the
confines of the vast city of Mumbai but for them it is a small circle of
film people who gather constantly at parties to celebrate themselves in a
city of enormous poverty.
Mahi Arora is played by Kareena Kapoor
and she gives an astonishing emotional roller coaster performance which feels
like she is aiming for award season. At times she looks so stunning it takes
your breath away but she also allows the camera into her private moments without
make-up when she looks like the girl on the bus or when she is in despair
with dark circles around her eyes that look like the rings of Saturn and
are so deep you could crawl into them and die. Kareena is of course from the
Kapoor family - the most famous filmi family of them all. Her grandfather
was Raj Kapoor, her mother was the popular actress Babita, her father was
Randhir, her uncles are Shammi and Shashi, her aunt is Neetu Singh, Sadhana
was another aunt. And of course, her sister was Karishma, a hugely popular
actress in the 1990s. Then as if her family needed more stars, she goes and
marries actor Saif Ali Khan whose mother was the legendary Sharmila Tagore.
Kareena has two children. I kind of feel sorry for them now. She has done
more than her share of big fat Bollywood romances, but she takes on difficult
roles like this as well. Check her out in Chameli in which she plays a street
prostitute in a small independent film (in this movie she does the same as
one of her movie roles).
As the film begins Mahi Arora is on top
with many successful films co-starring with her married lover Aryan (Arjun
Rampal), but we catch her just as her life begins to unravel thread by thread.
Her relationship is breaking down, she is drinking too much, popping pills
and those circles around her eyes are as large as the moon. But once the make-up
is applied for a public appearance, she takes on the form of a Bollywood heroine
but inside she is corroding. The film follows her life through the next few
years as her career goes off-kilter and she ruthlessly fights to be back
on top. She refuses to sleep with her director on one film and he practically
edits her out of the film. You keep expecting her to kill herself as another
relationship goes down the drain and a film disappears, but she is resilient
and keeps looking for the core of who she really is. This film is owned by
Kareena - the globes of her enormous eyes tell us everything about her character.
The film only did ok at the box office, but Kareena won that Filmfare best
Actress Award deservedly so. I don't know if the clothes designer won
anything but with 130 different outfits for Kareena, Manish Malhotra should
have. The director is Madhur Bhandarkar - the very good Chandi Bar with Tabu
as a prostitute.
