A Kapoor by Chance (Open Magazine)

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On 26 January, India’s Republic Day, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions released Agneepath, a much-trumpeted remake of the 1990 cult classic of the same name. Among those who watch and wait for Hindi films, there was a buzz of anticipatory questions: what was Karan Johar thinking, remaking father Yash Johar’s most beloved movie? Could debutant director Karan Malhotra’s vision ever live up to the memories of Mukul Anand fans? How could the too-beautiful Hrithik possibly step into the impossibly large shoes of Bachchan’s caustic, sneering Vijay Dinanath Chauhan?

By afternoon, however, as the first-day-first-show folk got to their computers, everyone was talking about something else. Trending on Twitter was not #HrithikRoshan, #KaranJohar or even #Agneepath, but #RishiKapoor.

After a lifetime of being typecast as a baby-faced love machine, the 59-year-old actor’s concentrated villainy as Rauf Lala has surprised Hindi film fans. Both gloriously filmi and entirely convincing, Rishi Kapoor’s performance is not only Agneepath’s biggest talking point, but also the one thing about the film on which everyone agrees.

As proprietor of an empire in which meat exports form a front for a sleazy business of underage female flesh and cocaine, Kapoor’s Lala has the task of embodying unmitigated evil while also being the father-substitute under whose watchful eye our hero grows to full gangsterhood. He must be both the ruthless kasai (butcher) with glowering eyes and the portly Muslim patriarch, mai-baap for the poorest of his community. At one point in the film, Rauf Lala is double-crossed and loses his son, and despite the terrible things his character does in running his unsavoury empire of business, Rishi makes you feel, for a moment, something akin to grief. I cannot think of anyone else who could have done it.

There is something about Rishi Kapoor’s face that makes you believe. It was true in 1970, when he was the slightly overweight teenager in Mera Naam Joker who made his entry by falling clumsily into the middle of a ring of expertly-skating classmates—and falling as clumsily in love with his sophisticated young teacher Miss Mary (Simi Garewal); it was true through the 1980s and 90s, when he managed to convincingly romance a long line of nubile actresses who kept growing further away from him in age. And it is more true than ever today, when he seems increasingly able to transform himself from Rishi Kapoor into the charming Sardar uncleji of Love Aaj Kal (2009), the anxious producer Romy Rolly of Luck By Chance (2009), or the hapless maths teacher of Do Dooni Char (2010).

Perhaps Lata Mangeshkar was onto something: she once called Rishi the most talented of the Kapoors, because his performances came without the baggage of mannerisms—without the bombast, melancholic excess or ada (stylish charm) so integral to the star personas cultivated by his grandfather Prithviraj, his father Raj, or his uncle Shammi. But despite his fine, often nuanced work, many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s simply took it for granted that this man, whose cherubic face retained an uncanny vulnerability despite the legendary Kapoor kilos having begun to fill out his Fair Isle sweaters, should continue to dance his way through the hearts of younger and younger heroines. After all, he was the original loverboy.

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