Aankhen, directed by Vipul Amrutlal Shah and starring Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Arjun Rampal, Sushmita Sen, Paresh Rawal and Aditya Pancholi released 23 Years ago. Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that Akshay had the chance to choose one of 3 roles? Subhash K Jha looks back at Aankhen, and in a throwback interview, Akshay Kumar reveals why he chose his role and more behind-the-scenes facts.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” is a favourite throwaway line of all characters in this intriguing hide and freak game. The truth behind the fiction in Aankhen sure is strange, no matter how we look at it. Adapted from the director’s Gujarati stage play, Aankhen is an ensemble piece that tries to turn the inherent staginess of the material into the film’s biggest USP.
Though the characters confab, conspire, and converse incessantly, as is the wont in plays, they also convey a lived-in density through their immense interactive impulses. The swift-and-sleek production values take care of the rest, communicating the basic virtues of star power without making the ultra-charismatic stars a puppet to the box office.
Aankhen is about an obsessively disciplined bank manager, Vijay Rajput (Amitabh Bachchan), who gets fired from his job for roughing up a corrupt staffer. Within a split second Rajput’s carefully cultivated world of passionate devotion and high-powered principles come crashing down in an inverted-pyramid of humiliation and acrimony. He begins to plot the downfall of the very workplace that he worshipped.
Rajput’s transformation from worship to war–ship is represented by his devious plan to rob the bank to which he gave all his life. He recruits Neha (Sushmita Sen), a teacher at a blind school, to train three handpicked blind men, Vishwas (Akshay Kumar), Arjun (Arjun Rampal), and Ilyas (Paresh Rawail), to undertake the most audacious bank robbery man has ever seen. Or not seen, as it happens to be.
It isn’t often that a film, let alone a mainstream Hindi film, looks at the physically challenged with compassion, understanding and benign humour. Aatish Kapadia’s self-adapted screenplay from his stage play works out the three blind characters’ mutual empathy in so much detail that we gradually begin to inhabit their dark but strangely illuminated world.
First-time director Vipul Shah was lucky to get a cast which simply sweeps into the plot’s incredible arc of redemptive retribution. Amitabh Bachchan, in the first fully-fledged negative role of his career since Parwana, performs the most discomforting villainy (for example, tickling the Paresh Rawail character to death) with a startling sincerity. His face contorts subtly into a grimace and reverts to a poker-faced neutrality in the blink of an eye. During the bank robbery, Bachchan’s split-second physical manoeuvres epitomize the spirit of immediacy and urgency that somehow eludes a major of part of this stagey thriller.
Paresh Rawal, as the comic member of a robbery gang, effortlessly invokes laughter with harrowing recollections of his childhood when he was kidnapped and forcibly blinded to beg on the streets of Mumbai. Rawal’s character keeps the improbable proceedings grounded to reality. Here’s one actor who never lets a script down.
The third scene-stealer in the film is Akshay Kumar. As the shrewd and clairvoyant Vishwas who senses the presence of the mastermind in their midst, Akshay brings a certain aromatic flavour to the blind man’s character. In a couple of dramatic sequences where he recalls his past and the sequences where he moves towards the Bachchan’s non-visible but ubiquitous figure in the room where the’re being trained for the heist, Akshay communicates a very appealing street wisdom. But his shots of affluent luxury in flashbacks make no sense. If he lived life king-size, why did he agree to be part of a robbery for a mere 50 lakh rupees?
Sushmita Sen, Rajput’s reluctant liaison officer, suffers in an underwritten role. As usual, she creates space for herself and plays her part with complete conviction. This is the first time that Sushmita has played the part of a victim and a leading lady who has no song to sing during the narrative!
Apart from the blind trio’s friendship song, the music, including Akshay’s totally irrelevant seduction duet with Bipasha Basu, come in the way of the film’s teacher-and-the-‘taut’ design. As for Kashmira Shah’s dance in the den, it carries the narrative’s course to the coarse.
The theme of the film—the planning and execution of a bank robbery—is so much a part of Hollywood cinema that the Indianizations in the form of romantic/raunchy songs come as intrusive interjections. And yet first-time director Vipul Shah takes enough risks with the mainstream genre and with the images of his high-profile cast to make us think kindly about his compelling intentions.
The slickness that Shah tries to bring into the heist is saved from going to waste by a host of devices. Veteran cameraman Ashok Mehta shoots the characters and the bank sets in granite and pastel colours that underscore the credibility –quotient of the outrageous crime plan.
But the frenetic, sweaty end-game with the Big B pulling out all stops to play a snarling, sneering epitome of evil finally collapses in an incredulous heap. At the end we are left with a film that’s unlike any we’ve seen in Hindi cinema. But it isn’t a fully formed work of art. Vipul Shah gets the basics right. He removes a lot of the staginess from the original material, but not enough.
Finally, it’s the stars Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, and Paresh Rawail who keep you hooked till the end of the blind man’s bluff.
In this throwback interview from 2002, Akshay Kumar was understandably excited about his change of image. “In Aankhen, I play a guy unlike anything I’ve done before. I’ve made a conscious decision not to repeat characters for the next couple of years. Maybe after that, I might play a character I’ve already done because there aren’t too many variations on the basic characters in our films.”
He said about working with this cast, “Arjun Rampal and I hit it off right away. Like me, he loves doing masti on the sets. I found him to quite like me. Sushmita Sen isn’t my leading lady in Aankhen. She’s with Arjun. But I have important scenes with her. She plays one of the protagonists, not a conventional leading lady. She’s beautiful. She’s done a wonderful job in Aankhen. The comfort level went up even more this time with Bachchan Saab. I loved working with him again after Ek Rishta. This time, we played very different roles. Aankhen is a very unusual film. Believe me, shooting with him is like a picnic. He’s so easygoing, disciplined, and supportive on the sets, it doesn’t take long to realize why he is who and what he is. God only knows how the film is going to fare. But I’ve really enjoyed working with Mr Bachchan the second time. I enjoyed working with him far more than the last time. When I worked with him for the first time in Ek Rishta… I didn’t know him well enough to be comfortable with him. An unnecessarily intimidating image has been created around Mr Bachchan. But I’ve discovered him to be a cool guy. Amitji, Paresh, Arjun, and I had a lot of fun together. Amitji and the whole gang of Aankhen would constantly be up to something or the other on the sets. Whether it was Gaurang Doshi (the producer) or someone else, we’d always make someone the brunt of our masti. Even I was at the receiving end. The three of us, Paresh, Arjun, and I, are part of one team, while Amitji and Sushmita are on their own. Arjun and I have a lot in common. We’re both into physical fitness. Whenever there was time off, we’d take off for jogging. As for Paresh Rawail, I had worked with him in Hera Pheri. Man, what an actor! Every character has a past and a reason to come together for the bank robbery. Every star in Aankhen has been chosen because he or she belongs to the film and has a definite role to perform in the drama. It’s wrong to sign stars, for the heck of it. That’s why so many big-budget films are flopping these days.”
The actor also revealed how he chose to play Vishwas and got into the skin of this character. “To me, Aankhen is important because the film is important. It doesn’t matter how many other stars are in it or how many scenes I‘ve in all. When the director Vipul Shah came to me with the script, I was damn excited. Actually, I had the choice of doing one of the three roles in Aankhen. But I chose the one I did. Earlier, too, I was offered both the hero and villain’s role in Ajnabee. I chose to play the villain. In Aankhen, I play a blind man with an extra-sensory perception. See, it is said whenever God takes away a normal faculty he makes sure to give something that normal people don’t have. I remember there was a guy with undeveloped hands. He used to write with his legs. I don’t think a normal person can do that because the frenzy to be like everyone else wouldn’t be there in him. In Aankhen, I’m a guy with a unique sixth sense. What I got to know about physically challenged people is they don’t want your sympathy. When they walk on the road, they do so as though they can see. They don’t like anyone helping them cross the road. They don’t want your pity or charity. If you can help them get work, they’ll be okay with that. But they want to stand on their own feet. Playing a blind man, I was able to understand the way the blind look at life. I followed my director Vipul Shah’s instructions very closely. In the Gujarati play from which Aankhen is adapted, Vipul had played my role. He asked me to not to blink too much. If a truck was passing in front of me, I‘d just visualize a blur passing before me without seeing what it really was. It’s not easy to explain what I did in the film. But Vipul made me do a lot of homework. He helped me a lot with my role. Vipul knew every character and situation in the play by heart. He was able to translate the whole thing perfectly to screen.”
