In celebration of Varun Dhawan’s birthday, Subhash K Jha shines the spotlight on the actor’s career and shares his list of Varun’s most mature and best performances… so far.
Sriram Raghavan’s Badlapur (2015) was Varun’s first thrust at something more substantial and realistic than the fluff stuff he had done till then. Director Sriram Raghavan had an older actor in mind to play a man grieving and raging for his slain family. Varun insisted on doing the role. Varun Dhawan, a bit raw around the edges, is nonetheless acutely effective as the grieving family man and Nawazuddin flawlessly flamboyant as the sly villain who has willy-nilly destroyed the hero’s life, together confer an overpowering immediacy to the proceedings. Varun falters due to inexperience but more than redeems himself in a sequence such as the one where he confesses to Nawazuddin about cold-bloodedly killing a couple. It is that ruthlessness of the rootless, a man who has lost everything, that Varun portrays with compassion.
Then came Shoojit Sircar’s October(2018). This was a deeply meditative, melancholic drama filled with resplendent visuals of trees shedding leaves and flowers, almost as if they were crying over the loss of love. The narrative is denuded of all elements of hysteria and melodrama. Studied and yet spontaneous, Shoojit Sircar’s outstanding grip over his narrative and characters is reinforced by the camerawork (Avik Mukhopadhyay), which celebrates the pulsating allure of Nature and Life while all around us, things fall apart and mortality seeps into our soul. Varun Dhawan’s deep understanding of what makes a character as seemingly overbearing as Dan brings out his sensitive side and navigates the film’s simple, elegant structure through a maze of life-transforming experiences, which convey the unexpectedness of life as it suddenly swerves into death. There is not a single superfluous moment in October, not a single frame that I would exchange for anything in the world. Everything falls in place in spite of the cosmic chaos that controls our universe. Because, as Varun Dhawan’s Dan realizes, there is love at the end.
After I saw Sharat Katariya’s debut film Dum Laga Ke Haisha, I hoped the director won’t sell out to the star-system. But his second film Sui Dhaaga starred a market-friendly lead star. I hoped Kataria’s second film won’t lose the charm and innocence of the first. Providentially, Sui Dhaaga loses none of the delicacy and sting even while providing space to its leads to surrender to their characters. Varun Dhawan surrenders to his character Mauji as though the role was tailor-made for him. Never afraid to look less than heroic on-screen, Varun furnishes his tailor’s character with a rugged candour. This is an actor and a character who are so sincere to their craft that they don’t mind crawling on the floor if that’s what it takes to stay afloat. Varun’s performance is filled with a smothered disappointment. It takes his quietly confident and deceptively docile wife, Mamta (Anushka Sharma), to bring out the suppressed ambition in her husband. The aspirational narrative of how Mauji finds his groove with considerable help from his street-wise wife works like a charm because all the performers are solidly sincere. But most of all, Sui Dhaaga wins our hearts because the director never milks the milieu for soppy sentimentality. Nor does he swing the other way to make the middle-class ambience a place to celebrate misery. The tone is constantly energetic yet poised. Katariyaa is neither awed by stillness nor intimidated by noise. He listens to the heartbeat of the heartland. We listen.
In a past interview, Varun spoke to Subhash K Jha on his priorities as an actor. “Today, the sur of cinema has changed beyond recognition. Things are gradually changing. We don’t know whether the future of Indian cinema is going to be Dabangg, Rowdy Rathore and Main Tera Hero or is it going to be Queen and The Lunchbox…we don’t know. I am greedy. I want to do both. I feel as an actor I should explore everything there is to explore. I am consciously choosing roles that are different from one another.”
