In another fabulous installment of This Day That Year: Subhash K Jha celebrates 28 Years Of Sridevi’s Finest Performance in Judaii.
In Sridevi’s oeuvre, Judaii is not regarded as one of her great performances. It’s a below-average film lifted to likeability by the central performance. I regard Sridevi in Judaii to be superior to her lauded performances in Chandni, Sadma, Lamhe and Mr India.
The truth is she is earth-shatteringly good as a screechy, overbearing housewife who loses her husband to greed.
Speaking of Sri in slush, Judaii, directed by the late Raj Kanwar (nice guy) and produced by Sri’s darling husband Boney, is a textbook on politically incorrect filmmaking, with Sri playing a human banshee screaming and swearing at her working-class husband Anil Kapoor until he marries the moneyed Urmila Matondkar. Her last hurrah before she bowed out to play wife and mother. Judaii is a crass melodrama directed by the late Raj Kanwar. It features Sridevi at her absolute best. The way she lifts the most mundane of scenes has to be seen to be believed.
The power of Sridevi was the power of a performing tornado. She took over the screen and led audiences into a world of wondrous emotions, all duly processed for ingestion. I remember her in Laadla (again directed by Raj Kanwar and co-starring Anil Kapoor), where she played a rich spoilt magnate of a company. The way Sri dominated the screen she actually made Kapoor look like her minion.
Judaai is a god-awful concoction about a woman who sells her husband to a female heart-broker. But watta performance. In her last blast before marriage, Sridevi exploded into a thousand tiny particles, each signifying the triumph of spontaneous talent. From a middle-class woman to a vulgar nouveau riche to the woman who loses everything to her greed, Sridevi’s performance, particularly in the second half when she wants her old rookie-cookie life back, is mindblowing. Viva la Devi!
Let me make a candid confession. I’ve always been more of a Sri fan than a Mads [Madhuri Dixit] man. At the peak of their respective careers when they were pitched against each other, Sridevi always had an edge.
She was what I’d call a complete star actress who left us with the most stunning hurrah in Judaii in 1997. As I said, it is a terrible film, and I’ve watched countless times to see her play the money-minded harridan who ‘sells’ her husband to Urmila Matondkar. Who but Sridevi could carry such an outrageous role with such enthusiastic élan?!”
She once told me how difficult it was to do Judaii. “I had to play this really greedy woman who is willing to sell off her husband. She is a terrible person and I had to make her likeable. I would say Judaai was one of my toughest roles. I had to somehow make my character Kajal not look like a vamp. She was so moneyminded that she is too blind to see she is destroying her marriage. This woman was completely alien to my nature.”
The film’s high point was the sequence where the now-repentant woman revisits her past in the humble home she once shared with her husband and children. This revisitation of a lost paradise is so special because Sridevi made it special. No other actress in the world could do what she could.
I remember sitting with Yash Chopra just after the release of Judaii.
Yashji picked up the phone and dialed Sridevi at the Breach Candy where the Diva had just delivered Janhvi. “Sri, listen after Judaii, you can’t just be a wife and a mother. You have to continue acting. I already have a script ready for you,” Yashji said.
I have no clue about Sridevi’s response.
But Judaii remains a supreme Sridevi vehicle to this day. The movie has dated. Sri hasn’t.
