It is very difficult to write about my dear friend Samantha Ruth Prabhu without pouncing on panegyrics. For starters, she is smart , smarter than most of the heroes she has worked with, if not all. But unlike her peers she doesn’t dumb herself down for the sake of, well, belonging. Many intelligent actresses from the past, like Zeenat Aman and Katrina Kaif have told me how they played down their intelligence when working the superstars.
The male superstars don’t like their co-stars to be smarter than them. Some screen queens like Sharmila Tagore,Jaya Bhaduri and Hema Malini refused to flutter their eyelashes to flatter their leading men.
Samantha belongs to that rare breed of screen queens.
Her best performance to date in Majili reflects her strengths as an actor and human being. She is an empowered woman, yes. But not a flag-waving feminist. There is a sense of tragic continuity, a resigned acceptance of fate, if you will, in the way the tangle within the love triangle plays itself out in Majili. The Telugu film about losing love and finding faith is a lengthy and fairly satisfying ode to the human heart and its vagaries.
First off, young Naga Chaitanya struggling to find his true bearings as an actor, discovers an inner core of strength in playing a deeply flawed character. Samantha’s company helped. We can see him struggling to keep with her emotional velocity in scenes that she steels, and I do mean steels, for him.
Naga Chaitanya’s Poorna is a loser. He has failed in love, failed in his career and he would be a big flop as a husband had he not found a woman so patient and determined, she embodies the stoicism of the ‘pati-vrata’ Sati in a remarkably contemporary avatar.
Samantha’s Sravani almost brings her fatally damaged husband back from the dead. That the real-life wife and husband play this troubled couple is a stroke of irony that gives Majili its added tinge and texture of intrigue and poignancy. Both Samantha (already a proven actor of merit) and Naga Chaitanya ,especially Samantha(no, I don’t call her Sam, it is unbecoming , like calling Shabana Azmi ‘Shabbo’) immerse themselves so deeply into their characters that it almost seems like they are determined to take this screen marriage into places that their own marriage would hopefully never go into.
The brooding intensity and the bleeding anguish of a marriage that’s held together by a thread (sacred or otherwise) comes across with a contemplative resplendence in the plot. The silent moments between the couple, the unspoken recrimination reminded of Ajay Devgn and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Mani Ratnam’s Mouna Ragam.
The film’s centrifugal force lies in the “discomfort” level in the married couple’s life. Director Shiva Nirvana weaves the threads of a fragile marriage of inconvenience beautifully into the narrative giving the lead pair ample space to build on their relationship.
Seamless in its emotional velocity, Majili neatly weaves together the fluctuating fortunes of three messy lives. There is nothing here that we haven’t seen before. But then, who said life is all about constantly finding new experiences? Exploring the inner spaces of the man-woman mythology, Majili hits on a narrative that’s moving and rewarding.
I wouldn’t like to comment on the way Samantha’s marriage went . But I do know she made as wholehearted an effort as Sravani in Majili to be, quote, The Good Wife, unquote. She ticked all the right boxes. But the marriage failed. Sometimes doing the right thing is just not enough.
Samantha is now on the threshold of a new beginning. This time, she won’t fail. She can’t afford to.
