Recently, a producer armed with the true story of a brave female soldier got the ear of Alia Bhatt through a journalist. Petite Alia, still smarting from the rejection of Jigra where she was horribly miscast as a tough fighter, was wary of going anywhere near another physically demanding assignment. So she let go of the offer. Guess which actress the producer went to next? Yami Gautam.
It indicated that the wind was blowing in two definite directions. One, real life stories are the flavour of the decade. As one actor-producer’s CEO put it, “Every time somebody comes to us with a script, we wonder which Wikipedia page they’ll bring along to prove that they’re narrating an authentic incident.”
Two, Yami Gautam is building herself the reputation of being one of the top five choices for a woman-centric story. It has come to her after playing an intelligence officer in Uri (2019), an IPS officer in the Abhishek Bachchan-starrer Dasvi (2022), a teacher who holds kindergarten kids hostage in A Thursday (2022) and an NIA agent in Article 370 (2024). “It makes me believe that the path I have taken has been the right one,” she said. A path where she goes for variety and weighty roles without doing scenes that make her squirm. At a time when every top heroine drops her clothes and her inhibitions, Yami made a tough choice.
Coming up soon is Haq, the film based loosely on the Shah Bano case of 1985, with Yami playing a woman fighting for her rights. To make it a timeless gender statement and to use cinematic license for better celluloid drama, director Suparn Verma and his writer Reshu Nath have changed Shah Bano to Shazia Bano. The premise of an Indian Muslim woman overriding the Muslim Personal Law and wanting the same rights as any other Indian woman seems a subtle shoutout for a Uniform Civil Code. But Suparn disclosed that his film would not tread political territory; it will only focus on Bano’s battle until she wins in the Supreme Court and won’t chronicle Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi getting the verdict overturned in Parliament with a majority vote. Suparn’s casting is clever as “Muslim actor” Emraan Hashmi playing the Sharia-following husband is a bit of a minority endorsement for a debatable subject. It makes one recall B.R. Chopra’s successful film Nikaah (1982) in which he trod on thin ice but got new “Muslim actor” Salma Agha to play the woman jolted by a “talaq, talaq, talaq”. But the 80s were not socially volatile times.
Continuing with cinema based on true incidents, thriller specialist Sriram Raghavan has also made a departure from his Badlapur and Andhadhun kind of fiction to pick up the emotionally rich story of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal for his next film Ikkis. It goes beyond the supreme valour of a young soldier from an army family who won a posthumous Param Vir Chakra. Just imagine his brigadier father being serendipitously hosted by the same Pakistani army officer who had shot the 21-year-old on the battlefield and getting from the “enemy” a first-hand account of his son’s undying courage. I’ve always wondered why nobody made a film on such a goosebumps-giving real story and now Sriram has done it with a crackling cast. Sriram went back to Dharmendra, his Johnny Gaddaar (2007) veteran, to play the retired octogenarian father to Agastya Nanda (Amitabh Bachchan’s grandson), as he flashes back to young Khetarpal’s days in the army, with Jaideep Ahlawat as the Pak officer.
Meanwhile, Farhan Akhtar said that he’ll direct his next Don only after he releases 120 Bahadur, in which he plays Major Shaitan Singh, who was also awarded a posthumous PVC. A screen documentation of the 1962 Battle of Rezang La, Farhan went one step further with his bona fide story. He hosted a dinner where the main guest was a long-retired army officer — the martyred major’s ageing father.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and an author