Worshipping False Gods

A lot of supposedly great actors have this habit of adopting a tick, a certain mannerism, in order to portray a character on stage or in front of the camera. Particularly in those cases when the character is significantly different in terms of age or background from the actor in real life.

I am not sure how difficult it is to play such characters as I am no authority on acting, considering that my last major outing as an actor was in an inter-house mono-acting competition in Class XII (I did win the 3rd prize though). Well, I did play a bush (a bush, not The Bush) in engineering college in an inter-hostel event called Music Manoranjan and then a bar dancer in the same event the subsequent year, both of which had major age and background difference from the real me, but let's ignore my stellar achievements for the moment.

I find these ticks really irritating and rather unnecessary. And, unless I am grossly mistaken, these are more common in Indian and other Asian films compared to American or European ones.

The other night I was watching Ek Ruka Hua Faisla (ERHF) and got really pained by Pankaj Kapoor's lip-licking affectation and Annu Kapoor's general over-acting. Pankaj Kapoor is arguably one of India's best actors (even though there are several of his performances that I find irritatingly ordinary, and just a handful that deserve the credit he seems to get all the time), and I wonder why he could not have played the character in a normal manner. Annu Kapoor, on the other hand, is not all that good an actor to begin with, but then some other actor could surely have done a better job. Or did Basu Chatterjee owe him a role?

I watched ERHF and 12 Angry Men back-to-back actually and their performances are strikingly bad when compared with those by Lee J Cobb (Pankaj Kapoor's counterpart) and Joseph Sweeney (Annu Kapoor's).

What is even more striking is that I hadn't realized in my earlier viewings of the two movies, how close a copy of the original ERHF is. To the extent that just as Jack Warden offers a chewing gum stick to another juror in 12 Angry Men towards the start of the film, M K Raina does it in ERHF. Of course, while Jack Warden wants to leave for a baseball game, Raina has to leave for a show of the movie Mashaal.

So, even though ERHF is a great Hindi movie and one that has found a major 'cult' following in these times, I was made to wonder how much credit should really go to the director, or even most of the actors. Performances by people like K K Raina or S M Zaheer, which I really liked earlier, paled when I realized that they probably just had to watch the original a couple of times and copy it for the Indian version.

One major difference, where the Indian makers showed some original thought, was to not make Pankaj Kapoor declare right at the beginning his reasons for his unreasonable behavior. The revelation hits home harder at the end, unlike in 12 Angry Men, where Cobb takes out his son's photo right at the beginning and spills everything out.

Nonetheless, if you haven't seen Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, please do give it a try. Even if a frame to frame copy of a Hollywood classic, it deserves credit for being a rare, tautly made Hindi film.And it was made when foreign DVDs weren't so easy to come by either, thus requiring greater effort to copy. Here's the Google Video link.