The Hindu Business Line : Bollywood's young brigade

Stars, cemented by their image, are invariably scared to strip down to the essentials. The new brat-pack knows that a one-off attention grab is no longer enough.

QUICK-START STARDOM: Shiney Ahuja and Kangana Ranaut in `Woh Lamhe'.

You get only a flash of him in one of this year's biggest blockbusters. His role in the Aamir Khan-Kajol starrer Fanaa is so blink-and-miss that he's gone before he's even had a chance to be there. But that's the thing with actors who have screen presence: They stay with you, as does Shiney Ahuja who gets unceremoniously killed after a five-minute part in the Yashraj production.

Shiney has that rare thing, the ability to become visible in a crowd. He first made his acquaintance in Sins, a tale of twisted, obsessive love, in which he plays a priest driven to experience the pleasures of the flesh, despite himself and his faith. The film was too visceral and violent. We filed it and forgot it, but the film got its leading man firmly to our notice.

Apart from being the year that will be forever marked as having produced two `thinking' hits — Rang De Basanti and Lage Raho Munna Bhai — 2006 will also be remembered for the munificent flowering of fresh faces, as well as for bringing to the fore talent which has been languishing for too long.

A clutch of new actors is filling up the gaps left by the stars who are now beyond the grasp of the newer, hungrier directors (Aamir being an exception, but even he has to function within the dictates of his stardom; he goes out on a limb like almost no other superstar does, there's only that much he can do to break those confines), who want to go to places Bollywood has only feared to tread till now.

There's Shiney, with his quiet intensity and speaking eyes. Kangana Ranaut, his co-star in the recent Woh Lamhe, can portray pain and hurt without appearing pretty all the time. Vidya Balan's effervescence lit up Munna Bhai's second coming, and it is difficult to imagine Munna without Circuit aka Arshad Warsi, who has been looking for his big Bollywood break for years, having found it in Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Munna franchise. Like Warsi, Ranvir Shorey is a wonderful comic, and it shows in the latest UTV production Khosla Ka Ghosla. And a whole bunch of others who are being called upon to provide the kind of support second-tier actors used to dream of once upon a time.

It was Sudhir Mishra's 2005 Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi which brought Shiney the kind of recognition young actors thirst for. The director, who had first-hand experience of the Emergency and the impact it had on the country's so-called creamy layer (his elder brother was at St Stephens' College during those years), brings it all out in a stunning-slice-of-life account.

Three young people of privilege (in Delhi, all you needed in those years was to be the children of politicians or businessmen to slide smoothly into prestigious colleges, jobs and clubs; and it still hasn't changed much) navigate the treacherous pathways their passions lead them to. Shiney plays the morally-compromised power-broker with a charm that's both attractive and repelling.

He then went on to do Karam, a regular pot-boiler; Gangster, a Mahesh Bhatt production, and now two back-to-back movies in the past fortnight, both Bhatt productions — Woh Lamhe and Zindaggi Rocks — in which he successfully occupies both screen and mind space.

This similar willingness to lay yourself bare to the all-seeing eye of the camera marks the twin performance of Kangana. In Anurag Kashyap's Gangster, she played a gangster's moll, who is tied to him by force. She meets true love in the shape of an undercover cop, played by Shiney, and the story unfolds in South Korea, which gives the film a distinct look. She packs more in Woh Lamhe, loosely based on Bhatt's relationship with Parveen Babi. Her Sana Azim, who goes happily tripping down the path to destruction, is compelling. Kangana clearly is willing to get down dirty and ugly to live her role, the hallmark of a true actor. If she can stay away from being typecast, the scourge of any newcomer, her future is bright.

In Khosla Ka Ghosla, a good-hearted tale of middle-class values under threat from new money, Ranvir Shorey plays Anupam Kher's son, the sort of person who doesn't think that college education is too hot but is still impressed enough by his elder brother's enterprise in having found a job in the US. Shorey's body language and delivery conform right down to a `small-colony Dilli ka ladka' who thinks nothing of bringing out his teeth-brushing activity (the brushing of teeth can be happy, convivial and communal amongst a certain class of the Capital's dwellers) to the park where his father is with his laughing club cronies, and bringing a naïve sort of cunning to bear upon his family's problems: if there is a `goonda' squatting illegally on his father's plot, he would even organise a load of `pehelwaans' to get them off it, without thinking of consequences. Shorey has sparkled in earlier movies too, notably Rajat Kapoor's Mixed Doubles.

Stars, cemented by their image, are invariably scared to strip down to the essentials. The new brat-pack knows that a one-off attention grab is no longer enough. There's a tracking system in place, which is increasingly getting more and more stringent. They also know that it is now possible to become stars through their willingness to do something startlingly new, something dark, edgy and exciting. Even five years earlier, this wouldn't have been possible, when play-safe was considered fail-safe. But now difference is being built into movies from big production houses which are happy and willing to spend big bucks on marketing, packaging and promoting.

Aamir is an acknowledged star-actor. Saif Ali Khan is willing to go that extra mile with a series of crackling acts (Omkara wouldn't have been the movie it is without his Langda Tyagi), and he too has cracked the star-actor conundrum, given his classy, expensive endorsements. Amongst the established leading actresses, there's Preity Zinta and Rani Mukherji; the beauteous Aishwarya Rai has still to acquire that winning consistency in her movies.

That's it... the field is wide open for the Shineys and the Kanganas, and their brave new brethren.