For decades, a famous bathing soap had advertisements featuring top actresses luxuriating in bath tubs swathed in a froth of foam. Then Shahrukh dove into the deep, blurred the lines between masculinity and femininity, sharpened his macho image with a wink and a smile, and won our admiration. As he returns to big screen shooting for Pathan, SRK throws a line to raving fans, harking back in spirit to his bathing beauty moment: Cap, shades, tee and denim make for the perfect garb for shooting pool, but his cue is aimed at one one rose-hued prize. “As long as there is pink in the world, it will always be a better place,” he writes, pocketing the ball. Loud applause ensues, but deep down, we’re ambivalent about those brown locks brushing his shoulders. Will it work?
The two eternal extremes of life have dominated us this past year of panic, enforced stasis and a protracted fight with an unseen foe—the steady, heartrending departure of people who gave us so much, and the arrival, or impending arrival, of a new generation. Bollywood, it lights dimmed like never before, was not an exception. Perhaps that’s the reason why a wedding—that joyous intertwining of lives around which we sentimentally sniffle—has captured headlines, as it has a welcome presage of normality. True, when Varun Dhawan, leading young Turk of filmdom, wed his fashion designer sweetheart Natasha Dalal in Mumbai, only 50 people were invited in, but their colour-coordinated lehenga, sherwani and stole rang out hope to all.
In spite of the fragility of her frilly dress, or the wispiness of those windblown tendrils of hair, one cannot miss the quiet confidence exuded by Taapsee Pannu. To that add the attribute of plainspeak. Taapsee, who’s carved a niche in women-centric movies, lays her dainty fingers on an anomaly—how male superstars, out of misplaced, insecure ego, rarely agree to play a part in them. Even if an actress has partially more screen time, she acidly observes, he’d have none of it. Her latest, Rashmi Rocket, is a gritty turnaround story of a down-an-out athlete from the Rann of Kutch. Take note: it has no big male stars.
Movies arrive, falter or prosper, then glimmer mournfully in the dark. Actors, too, arrive in a maelstrom of glamour, blind us for a decade, then recede and rest, at best, in alabaster perfection. Time trickles by, gathering into a mass of memories where everyone is more vital. Yet Salma Hayek—ingenue, shapely siren, tamer of pythons and tempestuous canvases—operates, it seems, outside this natural law. Whether swinging from a hammock from a scarlet swimsuit on holiday, or here, freshening up, half immersed, in a string bikini, she’s indistinguishable from the vision when she first swam across our ken. A French husband’s billions may have a part to play in keeping her in some eternal present, but there’s more to this inexplicable mystery. Look for confirmation in The Eternals, her next film.
