As long as Varun gives us one such performance every 2-3 years we forgive him all the excesses of Coolie No 1 and Judwaa, says Subhash K Jha.
Varun Dhawan’s career as a hero has been a festival of frivolity.
More often than not, Varun — 34 today, April 24 — plays carefree happy-go-lucky guys whose biggest worry in life is what to wear for the party in the evening and would that pretty girl in the red dress look at him when the deejay plays the latest eve-teaser.
Whether playing Rohan (Student Of The Year) or Badrinath or Humpty Sharma, the vibes are always basti se door parbat ke peeche masti mein choor ghane pedon ke neeche (courtesy: Bobby).
But wait there are film that prove Varun can act. Take a look.
Badlapur, 2014
Varun, a bit raw around the edges is nonetheless acutely effective as the grieving family man and Nawazuddin Siddiqui flawlessly flamboyant as the sly villain who has willy-nilly destroyed the hero’s life.
Together they confer an overpowering immediacy to the proceedings. ‘The tree remembers, the axe forgets,’ reads a proverb in the opening credits of a film that left me feeling like both the tree and the axe.
While the film’s pain-lashed topography in the first overture is exceptional — with every vein on Varun’s temples ringing a bell — the second overture gets audacious tongue-in-cheek subversive and sometimes downright silly.
As if the tree decided to get even with the axe by cutting off its own branches. Cast in the mould of the greatest redemptive dramas, Badlapur has an ambitious ambience of unmitigated doom irrigating almost every frame.
It’s as if Director Sriram Raghavan and his co-writer Arijit Biswas wants to shut out all light from his protagonist Raghavan’s life.
Insulated from the outside world, Raghav’s festering pain spreads itself out in the narrative spanning a seductive facsimile of reality that jumps off the screen to claim our attention.
October, 2017
Juhi Chaturvedi’s writing is so lucid I felt I knew first-hand all the characters who populate her wondrous world of alchemized pain.
The plot is about an obdurate seemingly obnoxious hotel-management trainee, played with willful gusto by Varun, who decides that the quiet shy colleague Shiuli (debutante Banita Sandhu) who has gone into a coma has some kind of a bonding with him.
Unsure of that thing we call love, Varun’s Dan simply lives on the IDEA of love, extolling its idealism to a point where his existence is defined by one casual 3-worded question that Shiuli asked her colleagues before she slipped into a long coma.
Varun’s deep understanding of what makes a character as seemingly overbearing as Dan bring out his sensitive side, 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.
Sui Dhaaga, 2018
Playing the diligent darji, Varun surrenders to his character Mauji as though the role was tailor-made for him.
Not afraid to look less than heroic on screen, Varun furnishes his darji‘s characters with a rugged candour.
This is an actor and a character who are so sincere to their craft they don’t mind crawling on the floor if that’s what it takes to stay afloat.
His performance is filled with a smothered disappointment it takes his quietly confident deceptively docile wife Mamta 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.
Director Sharat Katariya is neither awed by stillness nor intimidated by noise. He listens to the heartbeat of the heartland. We listen.
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