Two actors, one character: connecting the dots from Sharmaji to Bunuel to a gritty web series

(My latest Economic Times column)

--------------------

If you’ve watched the new film Sharmaji Namkeen, you know that the central character shape-shifts from one scene to the next. For instance, you might see Sharmaji, played by Rishi Kapoor, preparing to do something or go somewhere… then he steps out of the house with bag in hand and he is now played by Paresh Rawal. Or the other way round.

This isn’t because the film had set out to be formally playful along the lines of, say, Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (where two actresses alternated playing the role of the woman described in the title) or Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (in which six actors – including a woman, Cate Blanchett – portray different sides of Bob Dylan). In Sharmaji Namkeen, the dual casting came from a marriage of sentiment and practicality: after Rishi Kapoor passed away mid-shoot, Rawal filled in for him.

The decision turned out to be a good one; this is a warm-hearted film about the need to feel alive and relevant even after the world has given you a sell-by date. I know of viewers who became so absorbed with the story that after a point they barely noticed – or thought about – the constant switching between the two actors (and this despite a considerable girth difference between Kapoor and Rawal, apart from the dissimilarity of features). On one level I wish I had such immersive faculties; but on the whole I’m glad I experienced the film as I did – the storytelling anomaly brought a namkeeniyat to a sweet middle-class Delhi narrative, making the experience pleasantly off-kilter.

The two-actors-as-one-character thing has often been done in non-avant-garde contexts, of course, most obviously when two performers play the same person at different ages – within the same film or in two closely connected films. As the lean young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, Robert De Niro had to pull off a tricky balancing act, making it plausible that this Vito could fill out and grow into the senior don played by Marlon Brando in the first film, but without turning the performance into a facile mimicry of Brando’s mannerisms. Or, from a cinematic galaxy far, far away, consider Master Mayur – he of the droopy, horse-like face – as the child version of Amitabh Bachchan (also equine) in films like Laawaris. By that point, playing the young Bachchan had been Mayur’s main job profile for years, and you can see it in the dhaba scene where he dances to “Mere Angne Mein” (playing on the radio), using all his knowledge of Bachchan’s one-step moves, gestures and expressions.

In cases like Sharmaji Namkeen or Obscure Object (or Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which had to be reorganised after Heath Ledger’s death), you know a certain suspension of disbelief is required; that artifice is involved, and there’s a reason for it. (Sharmaji Namkeen is a narrative film, but it opens with a Fourth Wall-breaking introduction by Ranbir Kapoor, explaining how much it had meant to his father, and how he tried playing the role himself with prosthetics before Rawal agreed to come in.) But what when a story aims for verisimilitude and rootedness in dealing with a real-life tragedy? I’m thinking about the recent web series Grahan – a poignant if overlong narrative that moves between the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and a contemporary investigation – in which a key character, Rishi Ranjan, is played in the present by Pawan Malhotra, and in the past, as a strapping youngster, by Anshumaan Pushkar.

Both performances are solid, and there is a passable facial resemblance between the actors in close-up sequences. But in the long-shot scenes I found it hard to see them as the same person because while Malhotra is slim and short-built (as I realised firsthand when I met him for an interview once), Pushkar is broad-shouldered and definitely taller. The physical differences between the two actors become obvious after watching scenes where the Ranjan of 1984 and the Ranjan of 2016 are each shown standing next to the same character.

As a critic this is where you’re allowed to over-think. One explanation, I mused, could be that Ranjan’s 1984 experiences – including feelings of guilt and shame – have diminished him; that he has shrunk into himself, and the casting is meant to reflect this. This interpretation becomes much less persuasive if you watch the show till the end, but subtextual analysis is subtextual analysis. Besides, there’s something about the human brain, something in the way our eyes and senses respond in these situations, that once a basic idea is in place (and is being executed with integrity), we go along with the ride; our brain finds ways to connect the dots. Most fans of the series The Crown – which changes its cast every two seasons – would agree that there is no resemblance at all between, say, Matt Smith and Tobias Menzies (and you could argue that neither of them looks much like the real-life Prince Philip anyway) – but after a point that doesn’t matter.

Anyway, I would take my minor discomfort about Grahan over the time when I neatly spoiled a thriller for myself by seeing a strong resemblance between two actors (the octogenarian Diana Rigg and the young Anya Taylor-Joy) – when the effect of the film’s twisty denouement depended on a viewer not seeing the resemblance. The film in question was Last Night in Soho, and if you haven’t watched it, there, I’ve spoiled it for you now. Blame the casting department.