Main Actor Nahin Hoon Review:
Doing bad acting good is an acquired art. Observe Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019). In it, the actor plays a fading Hollywood star who has been reduced to playing villains for TV Westerns. While shooting for one of them, he is seen playing an antagonist who has kidnapped a little girl. The scene is campy and DiCaprio acts like an actor who confuses intensity for interiority. He improvises, throws the young girl (who was sitting on his lap all this while) on the floor. The director says bravo. The eight-year-old whispers in his ear that it was the greatest acting she had seen in her entire life. DiCaprio’s eyes well-up, he looks around and then at the ceiling. Even in life he is showcasing that emotion like an actor in a melodrama. But the whole scene gives you two feelings. You laugh at the guy but then you feel sorry for him.
Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Chitrangada Satarupa
Written and directed by: Aditya Kripalani
Rating: 2.5 stars
A similar scene in Aditya Kripalani’s indie-drama Main Actor Nahin Hoon has Nawazuddin Siddiqui, playing a non-actor, doing a scene, as part of an audition, with a professional actor over a video call. Nawaz is a doctor who has to tell his patient that she needs to join the alcoholic anonymous programme. His first take is stiff, like he is just hammering lines. His next is softer, like he is a father giving some stern advice to his daughter. It’s all amusing. A delight to watch a great actor act convincingly bad.
Nawaz plays Adnan Baig, an anxiety-ridden ex-banker in Frankfurt who, after a push from his daughter, decides to give acting a shot. His co-actor is a bitter, alcoholic, experienced but struggling actor Mouni (Chitrangada Satarupa). After being impressed by her acting during the audition, Adnan begs her to teach him some tricks of the trade. Thus begins a conversation, over video call, between two different people--a cynic and a seeker--and also between two different worlds-- Mumbai’s sweltering hustle and Frankfurt’s cold serenity.
It’s a film for the actors by the actors. Most of the pleasures are derived from Nawazuddin and Chitrangada playing off each other as they trot around their respective towns. She teaches him some acting techniques, some of them funny, like enacting the scene they previously did in the audition in the babbling sound of Donald Duck, others more intrusive, like describing your relationship with your father.
But Main Actor Nahin Hoon can’t seem to go beyond these conversations. Adnan and Mouni reveal themselves more to each other than to us. Mouni’s childhood trauma becomes an acting bit, Adnan’s pain regarding his mother is more spelt out than felt. The cinematography only suffices to show the contrast between Mumbai and Frankfurt’s architecture. We also don’t see much of Adnan and Mouni when they are not on the video call and their relationship builds up rather easily. I expected more hiccups.
There is an endearing indie-energy in the film and some sequences and dialogues hit the spot but they are mostly scattered. Watching Main Actor Nahin Hoon is akin to experiencing a stage play where the performance is the only plot. It’s a treat to watch Nawazuddin suddenly break character and be unpredictable but once that cat is out of the bag, the film in itself merely scratches the surface of art and its relationship with life. Both Adnan and Mouni seem one-dimensional and the makers rely overwhelmingly on Nawazuddin and Chitrangada’s performances. A film can’t just be about one good thing. It’s a collective effort, like a well-synchronised orchestra. Main Actor Nahin Hoon might just be a mono-act.
