Madhuri Dixit movies aren’t what they used to be. In one of her two 2014 releases, she played a poetry-fetishising empress in love with her handmaiden; in the other, a parkour-trained outlaw quick with mid-air kicks. Both were huge risks for a megastar in an industry not used to rewarding bold choices. Playing a gay aesthete in January before playing Rajinikanth in March—there has never been anything quite like it. In the Andheri conference room where we met, Dixit, now forty-six years old, sounded content about the new films. “I’m trying to think of any movie in the past,” she said of Gulaab Gang, the action film, “that, in that setting of a Bollywood potboiler, has women in the key roles. A movie with all the masala, all the dialogue-baazi, and yet with a female protagonist and antagonist.” Based loosely on the crusading Uttar Pradesh vigilante Sampat Pal and her brigade of pink-saree-clad women, Soumik Sen’s film was hardline commercial cinema, a movie unsubtle enough to have starred, say, Akshay Kumar. “That a woman was playing that kind of a role was fascinating, I thought, because it changes the rules in one go,” Dixit said. “It’s like throwing down a bowling ball and watching the pins go flying.” Raja Sen on how Madhuri Dixit once transformed the Hindi film industry and is now set to do it all over again.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 11:07:15 +0000
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