SIDHARTH MALHOTRA UNVEILS HIS MACHO SIDE IN MARJAAVAAN
by MOHNISH SINGH
FEARLESS actor Sidharth Malhotra has never shied away from pushing the envelope and experimenting with his roles in a way that most actors don’t.
He was last seen in Jabariya Jodi earlier this year, where he played a Bihari man who kidnaps greedy grooms and won praise for his performance.
The dashing star’s new film Marjaavaan sees him portray an intense man, who can go to any length for his love. The powerful movie also features Tara Sutaria, Rakul Preet Singh and Riteish Deshmukh in key roles.
Ahead of the release of Marjaavaan on November 15, Eastern Eye caught up with Sidharth Malhotra in Mumbai to talk about the film, what led him to take up the role and his upcoming projects. The actor also opened up about staying away from the web-space and more.
With Marjaavaan, you return to the action space again. How does it feel?
I am entering into the action space after three to four films – last was Gentleman (2017) – and this kind of action after Ek Villain (2014) and Brothers (2015). Here, I am beating up 10 more people, pulling up tankers and breaking helmets. But Marjaavaan is larger-than-life. It’s an intense love story, but its treatment is giving it a, I would say, 70s and 80s cinema kind of feel. Because my director was very convinced by it and I am also a big fan of that era, we are trying to do something new with an intense, passionate love story.
Is this more challenging than the normal roles you get in today’s times?
It requires more conviction from an actor’s point-of-view, because it is all about the attitude and the personality on screen. You want to stand there, show that anger and beat up that many people, and have a style. I have been a fan of these elements in a film. I am a huge fan of Amitabh Bachchan, Sunny Deol and Sanjay Dutt. It helps me at least to believe in this kind of cinema. I think our Indian audience likes this journey that you take them through in those two hours, and we are hoping to entertain them with our intense love story.
What drew you to be a part of Marjaavaan?
I met (director) Milap Zaveri a year ago before his film Satyameva Jayate (2018) released and said I wanted to do an intense love story. He replied that he had one. And that is when I heard the script of Marjaavaan. It had action also, which I liked. Then we realised we needed somebody unique for the villain’s character. That’s how Riteish Deshmukh came on board. That is where the project became interesting because it’s a cast friendly film.
Tell us more…
I think it is a great role for Riteish. For the first time, we see a negative character being played by a dwarf. Today, we have the technology to do it, and I think he is very entertaining in the film. Apart from being menacing – and, yeah, the child in me wanted to play the hero always – I got very excited and said to myself that let’s play a quintessential hero for a change. In the trailer, we see an undercurrent of religious references to mythology.
Is that the USP of the film?
It is not a take on a religion! It is not a religious conflict. The conflict is about just power and what happens to the love story. It’s incidental that these lines are there in the trailer. You have to see the film to know more. We have one more trailer, which focuses on the love story and is predominantly about the film. Marjaavaan is essentially a love story between my character and Tara Sutaria’s. She is mute in the film, so it makes it special and innocent. What happens in their lives is what you see in the film.
The movie has good music. Which is your favourite song in the film?
I love the two love songs that we have, Tum Hi Aana and Thodi Jagah. I like both songs, but Thodi Jagah, if given enough time, would become as good. We are happy that the music of the film is working because the love story is an essential part of the film. People are also loving the visuals on the music.
How was it to work with Riteish Deshmukh for the second time?
This film has a lot of reunions. It is me and Riteish Deshmukh, me and Rakul Preet, me and Milap Zaveri (who also wrote Ek Villain). Tara Sutaria was a new entry. It was great working with everyone. Whenever Riteish Deshmukh comes in my love story, the girl dies. He is the main reason I don’t get the girl at the end. (Laughs) I have to stop doing love stories with him. But it is interesting to have this kind of pairing where he is the antagonist. Here, he has come in a new avatar and it’s so refreshing to see him like this. It adds a lovely flavour to the film.
The special effects used in the film are great…
It’s just technology that we have used and suddenly the impact is different. You know a guy who is vertically challenged and doing such menacing things, looking up to you and saying such stuff. It’s very interesting. It is going to be really fresh for the audience. Shooting it was at times tedious. We had to use a green screen. Sometimes when he is standing, I am staring at his crotch, saying the lines because the eye-line has to match. Also, somebody who saw from the outside, found it really funny. Sometimes we were talking to thin air because he had to be placed in it during editing. I think technically shooting with such a character sometimes becomes tedious, but the final product feels great. You started your career as an assistant director.Would you like to go behind the camera someday and helm a project?
I love the process of filmmaking. Everything about the business I have learnt from being an assistant director. I never went to a film school, so that was like a film school for me. Maybe, but not in the next few years. I am hungry and selfish as an actor right now.
Many actors are venturing into the digital space. Do you have any plans?
Again, it has not excited me as such. There is enough audience and a variety of roles to play in films. So far, it has not intrigued me so much to play a character in that medium because we are getting to play such different characters in movies. I have made sure all my films look different, from different worlds.
What are your upcoming releases?
I am shooting for Shershaah, which is a biopic of captain Vikram Batra.
This is your first biopic. Did you find it challenging?
Every film is challenging and not easy. Shershaah has its own difficulties in terms of shooting and locations. It is a film based in the 1990s and about the Kargil war. He has a twin, so I am playing a twin brother as well. I had been trying to make that film for two-and-a-half years. Finally, producer Shabbir Boxwala and I took it to Dharma Productions, and we are making the film today. So, we still have the shooting left. By the way, Shershaah was his (Vikram Batra) code name at Kargil war.
Do you have a dream role?
I think a superhero character. India doesn’t have a superhero character, which is our own desi version, and if any writers are listening and they have any character that we can build on, I am in. There is so much potential to create something here. The West is doing so well; we all watch their superheroes. It has to be new as I don’t want to emulate anybody. India has to have a new one. If you copy Superman what is the point.
The audience wants to see you in an out-and-out comedy. Have not you been offered anything all these years?
There are so many genres, but an out and out comedy has not been set up. Jabariya Jodi was an attempt to make a light film. Kapoor & Sons (2016) is light, but it is not a ‘ha-ha’ comedy. Let’s see if I get any comedy in the future.
Marjaavaan is in cinemas now
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A seated Jain enlightened teacherAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Ganesha from JavaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
A Chinese silk painting depicting the BuddhaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
ArdhanarishvaraAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Head of a grimacing yakshaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
NagaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The Bimaran casketAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Hunia Chawla
A still from rehearsal
Them performing liveNajmuddin Saifuddin Qawwal Group
The cast of Marriage Material in key moments from the play, including Avita Jay, Kiran Landa, Omar Malik, Irfan Shamji and Anoushka Deshmukh
Sathnam Sanghera’s 'Marriage Material' adapted into bold new play on conformity
The play Marriage Material at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera’s novel of the same name, which first came out in 2013.
She is lucky to have Iqbal Khan direct Marriage Material. The play, a co-production with the Birmingham Rep, is set in the late 1960s. Mr and Mrs Bains (played by Jaz Singh Deol and Avita Jay) run a corner shop in Wolverhampton. Their younger daughter, Surinder (Anoushka Deshmukh), is 16, her sister Kamaljit (Kiran Landa) is just a bit older.
They have a neighbour, Patwant Dhanda (Irfan Shamji), who, as we shall soon see, is not a very pleasant man. In fact, he comes across just as racist as Enoch Powell, who represented Wolverhampton South West for the Tories from 1950 to 1974.
It will be recalled this was a time when Sikhs working on the buses were told they couldn’t wear a turban. That was a hard-fought battle that had to be won.
The Bains, meanwhile, simply want to get their girls married off.
Nothing new here, I thought.
What makes the tale different is that the plot twists and turns down the generations. Mr Dhanda, who has the makings of a paedophile, makes a pitch for one of the girls when Mr Bains dies early in the play. “A life with no man in the house is no life,” he informs the newly widowed Mrs Bains.
Mr Dhanda has a wife but she has returned to India so he considers himself to be a free man.
Surinder’s English teacher from school, Miss Flanagan (Celeste Dodwell), who is also head of the fifth form, tells Mrs Bains about her daughter: “I don’t want to embarrass you, but she is bright. Ridiculously bright.”
She adds: “Mrs Bains, I think it would be a pity if Surinder didn’t stay on at school.” The initial response from Mrs Bains is not encouraging: “Too much education makes people’s brains get mixed up, they don’t sleep at night…”
But she is finally persuaded that Surinder should be allowed to stay on for a while longer before being married off.
Mr Bains was very old school. When Surinder confides she would one day like to be “a somebody”, he is amused that “my daughter wants to be a somebody”.
“Like you,” she tells her father.
Mr Bains consoles his daughter: “We will find a somebody for you to marry.”
At the point of a possible marriage, however, Surinder is sweet-talked by chocolate salesman Jim Wilson (Tommy Belshaw) into running away with him. They share a love of literature, and he calls her “Sue Bains”. But the relationship does not end well.
Once she has left, Surinder is written off as “dead” by her family. The story that is circulated is that she was only 16 when she was killed in a car crash. That’s better than to let on that she ran off with a white man.
By the time she is reconciled with her sister towards the end of the play, a great deal has changed. Kamaljit married Tanvir Banga (Omar Malik), a young man who helped out in the Bains’ corner shop. When the two sisters meet again, Tanvir has also died. But he and Kamaljit had a son, Arjan Banga (Jaz Singh Deol doubles up for this role after the death of Mr Bains). He has come home after his father’s death to help his mother who is still running the family corner shop.
Meanwhile, Mr Dhanda’s business has prospered. He now has a son, Ranjit Dhanda (the role is taken by Omar Malik after Tanvir’s death), and he is nearly as unpleasant as his father.
Arjan has an English fiancée, Claire (Celeste Dodwell). In London, Arjan worked as a creative director. But after deciding to stay in Wolverhampton to help his mother, he decides he cannot marry Claire because she is white. In other words, Asians are not free of racism, either. Happily, at the end, the couple are reconciled.
As for Surinder, she parted company with Jim Wilson after realising he was all talk, depended on her for money and had failed to earn a penny from his literary pretensions. She had prospered, though, as a hotel owner and had been transformed in time into a well-groomed businesswoman. After being tracked down by Arjan, she decides to return to her roots in Wolverhampton and help Kamaljit run the family corner shop. Perhaps 50 years had passed during the passage of the play.
Being subjected to racism turned some Asians into racists themselves. The word goreh (white person) is repeatedly spat out with venom. Maybe it is worth remembering the play’s audience isn’t exclusively Asian – white folk are watching as well. And maybe some of the toilet humour ridiculing white people, which always makes me cringe, could be cut out.
In Sanghera’s novel, there is a quote from Enoch Powell’s speech in November 1968: “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact, he is a west Indian or an Asian still... he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one. Time is running out against us and them. With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the US.”
In Marriage Material, where the acting is marvellous (apart from Mr Dhanda’s Indian mannerisms and accent being overdone) we do travel across a couple of generations.
There is a scene when Tanvir rejects Mr Dhanda’s vision of creating a little Punjab in Wolverhampton.
Mr Dhanda wants to take over the Bains’ corner shop and is putting pressure on Tanvir to sign the papers. He says: “In this country, money is the path to freedom.”
“Sign, please,” he instructs Tanvir. “We must make sure our children learn to behave nicely, according to our rules.”
He insists: “We maintain our identity so we can be ourselves.”
Tanvir disagrees: “We can be us here. With the goreh.”
Dhanda warns him: “Then we will be inviting chaos.”
Tanvir’s comment is telling: “You sound like Enoch.”
Kamaljit, who is expecting a baby with her husband Tanvir, says: “I would like my child to grow up knowing the history of the Gurus and to read the Granth Sahib. And to love their culture.”
Tanvir tells his wife: “I would like my child to go to the finest schools, to cheer for England in the World Cup and eat Yorkshire pudding on a Sunday.”
Kamaljit sets out a dream that has perhaps come to pass with many third and fourth generation British Asians: “Maybe our child can do both.” Much, much later, in a throwback to the past, we learn of Surinder’s O-level results: “Biology A, Chemistry A, English Language A, English Literature A, French A, History B, Latin A, Mathematics A, Physics A…”
Kamaljit tells her younger sister: “Never mind about the B.”
And that is quintessentially Asian. Their acting is outstanding.
Marriage Material is at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre until June 21, and at the Birmingham Rep from June 25-July 5