Parineeta was my first on-set assignment for The Telegraph. It was in Siliguri in the November of 2004. Director Pradeepda (Sarkar) was so secretive about his leading lady that he didn’t allow her to be on the sets. The first time I saw her was when she peeked out from the door of the Darjeeling toy train during the shooting of Kasto mazza. I have been a Balan man ever since.

That lady can be anything. She can be sweet, she can be sexy. She can be cheap, she can be classy. She can be raw, she can be refined. She can be vulnerable, she can be violent. She can be romantic, she can be rowdy. She can be Vidya, she can be Bidya.

A few films might have failed her, some scripts let her down, not all clothes fitted that well but the Balan lady has always outdone her movies.

Now what if a movie is entirely about her. By entirely I mean almost all the scenes have her and there’s not even a Naseer or a Nawaz for support. Just nobody else but her throughout the running time of the film.

That’s the greatest trick Bobby Jasoos ever pulled. To have the film carpeted by Vidya the Balan. And such is the power of that woman, when the animated opening credits start the Bobby figure looks like any other girl but by the time it ends, she has turned into Vidya. Or Vidya’s turned into her. One and the same, you see.

Hailing from the atmospheric Moghalpura suburb in old Hyderabad, Bilkis the elder daughter of the Ahmed family wants to be Bobby Jasoos. It’s not quite explained from where she got infected by this detective bug but the title song reasons that she is Sherlock Holmes ki phuphi and Bond ki khala.

She is usually hired by the locals for hanky-panky cases and Bobby’s business is not exactly booming. Kiran Kumar’s Khan arrives as an angel with envelopes full of cash and some strange demands. He wants Bobby to find two girls and a boy; he only knows their age, their real names and their birthmarks.

Bobby goes about the task in her inimitable way, devising ingenious methods and getting into crazy disguises to find her people. Along the way she would fall in love with the TV show host Tasawur (Ali Fazal) and show her Abba, who’s all but disowned her, that Bilkis is his shaan, not his sharam.

While Vidya makes Bobby fun and feisty, everything around her is a little too wishy-washy. The mise en scene is authentic but authentic can be distancing. The varied vignettes of middle-class Hyderabadi life can make a Muslim social film of the ’70s proud but here they rust up the roller-coaster ride. Also, one of the biggest failings of the film is that the big revelation at the end is about a character you care very little about.

The piece de resistance? The many avatars of Vidya. In each of her disguises, she looks so much in character, that you secretly wish for one whole film with Vidya the bearded beggar, Vidya the toothless astrologer, Vidya the plump TV producer and so on. You just can never have enough of Vidya!

Of the rest of the cast, Ali Fazal is an absolute charmer. He does look younger than Vidya in the film but boy, he can match up to her in the most intense of scenes. Arjan Bajwa looks largely disinterested but it is Kiran Kumar who is the weakest link. A strange casting choice one would say for such a pivotal role, one that hurts the film badly. Also, the quality of acting in that one Arjan Bajwa-Kiran Kumar scene in the end tells you how much of Bobby Jasoos is Vidya Balan and how much of Bobby Jasoos is first-time director Samar Shaikh.

Shantanu Moitra’s background score is another major driving force of the movie, creating and altering the mood and momentum at will. And the two songs in the two halves, Jashn and Tu, are sure to keep the ears happy.

Earlier this year at the Oscars, Cate Blanchett said: “Female films with women at the centre are not niche experiences .... Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.” I second Cate but Balan is first. Always.