Vidya Balan returned to the big screen after almost four years with her recent release Neeyat. The actress has had released on the OTT in the meantime but a theatrical had been absent. While Neeyat did not set the cash registers ringing, it did give her fans a glimpse of vintage Vidya. In a chat with DNA prior to the film’s release, the actress spoke about the film, the concept of women-centric cinema, and how the pandemic has changed theatre experience.
In Neeyat, Vidya plays a detective, who has shades of both quirky and macabre. Over the course of her career, she has played both intense characters and funny ones. But she says there is hardly any difference in her approach towards them. “Both are equally difficult and easy. Every character is a new person. There may be similarities, but each one is an individual, and that is my attempt while working with my director – to look at the character as an individual. There is always a great amount of joy but also a great amount of nervousness. You are trying to really discover the person within the character,” says Vidya.
Throughout the promotions for Neeyat, Vidya was asked how she prepared to play a ‘woman detective’. She says that she does not mind that term, giving a parallel with the term ‘women-centric films’. She argues, “I think there are not enough women detectives so you need that distinction. It’s like there are women-centric films. I don’t have a problem with that description. The day there are enough number of women-centric films, we will stop calling them that. So, we still have a long way to go. This is a reminder of the fact that there is a long road ahead.”
Vidya was one of the flag bearers of the commercial ‘women-centric’ cinema with hits like The Dirty Picture and Kahaani. “I have been doing ‘women-centric films’ since 2008 and I still get asked that question. How do I answer that because that’s what I have been doing since 2008. But I understand what inspires that question - the fact that there are still not enough of those films,” says the actress.
Neeyat lacked a huge star. It was a niche crime thriller, and yet it opted for a theatrical release. Post-pandemic, most ‘smaller’ films have shunned theatres for OTT. Noting that change in landscape, Vidya says, “I think people have consumed so much OTT that their minds have opened up to the possibilities of storytelling. Genres, characters, languages – they are agnostic to it. We are not wedded to one type of story or one type of hero. There is a change. Also, people got used to sitting and watching films in the comfort of their homes.”
The actress notes that what is working in theatres is also different now and the reasons for success have changed too. “Today, I think it’s not so much the promotion but really the word of mouth that determines the success of a film. Be it Drishyam 2 or several other films that have worked recently, they have all been word of mouth films. None of the films have had a big opening like they used to pre-pandemic,” she sums up. The Hindi film industry has seen a number of sleeper hits post-pandemic, which have worked primarily through word of mouth, ranging from The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story to Drishyam 2 and Uunchai.
