In celebration of Vicky Kaushal’s birthday, Subhash K Jha focusses in on the actors best performand and it is probably not the one you are thinking about. This one begins with M instead of C. It was Kaushal’s debut film, released in 2015.
Masaan, produced by Madhu Mantena and Phantom, acquires a renewed significance as director Neeraj Ghaywan heads to Cannes with his second feature Homebound, which comes ten years after Masaan was released.
Masaan is set in Varanasi. It is the kind of city that sucks you into its vortex and doesn’t give you the freedom to depart unless it’s by death. There are raw vivid scenes of burning ghats in the film whose scorching embers will singe the viewers’ soul forever.
Masaan is not an easy film to ingest. It sucks you into its world of characters doomed by caste and ruined by wrong choices. The main protagonist was played by debutant Vicky Kaushal, whose deep link with the middle class helps him to manoeuvre his character in and out of the trauma and anguish that the underprivileged classes are perpetually subjected to.
Neeraj Ghaywan was an assisted to Anurag Kashyap before he made Masaan. There is no trace of Kashyap in Ghaywan’s style of filmmaking, which is gentle and persuasive. You will never find Ghaywan becoming ill-tempered in his vision of inequality.
Masaan sucks you into its world of characters doomed by caste and ruined by wrong choices. The main protagonists are played by Sanjay Mishra, Richa Chadha, and Vicky Kaushal, actors whose deep link with the middle class helps them to manoeuvre their characters in and out of the trauma and anguish that the underprivileged classes are perpetually subjected to. The caste system is smacked on its head before it proceeds to smack all of us in places where it hurts the most. The young lovers played with an unspoilt naturalness by Vicky Kaushal and Shweta Tripathi, build an atmosphere of lulling gentleness around the plot that shatters to bits as the script moves to a zone of unexpected explosion. Splintered lives shatter and mend in this penetrating portrait of lives lived on the edge. Compelling and devastating, Masaan marked the remarkable directorial debut of Neeraj Ghaywan.
Vicky Kaushal, whose journey as an actor began with Masaan, was not the first choice. Rajkummar Rao was the first choice for the film. This is what Vicky told me. “The director Neeraj Ghaywan and I were both assistants on Gangs Of Wasseypur. We bonded since then and would discuss scenes from Masaan. During that time, Neeraj wanted to sign Rajkummar Rao for my part. But his dates didn’t work out. That’s how I got the part.”
Kaushal never expected the reactions that got for his performance in Masaan. “I knew I had worked hard. But this kind of praise was unimaginable.”
