Lust Stories 2: Who’s the man in The Mirror?

Shrikant Yadav and Amruta Subhash in a still from Konkona Sensharma's segment 'The Mirror' in the recent Netflix anthology 'Lust Stories 2'.

On the sets of the only mature segment of the recent Netflix anthology Lust Stories 2, Konkona Sensharma’s The Mirror, Shrikant Mohan Yadav recalls being in a “comfort zone” — a phrase that would recur more times in our conversation than what the Earth takes in skirting around the Sun. He’d say things in Marathi and leave a bemused Sensharma asking actor Amruta Subhash, ‘what did he say?’

Shrikant Yadav’s Kamal, a courier man, plays husband to Subhash’s Seema, the house help who works at Isheeta’s (Tillotama Shome’s) Andheri West house. Though the dialogues were written in Hindi, Sensharma tested Yadav’s scenes in both Hindi and Marathi. A Maharashtrian couple would naturally converse in Marathi at home. “After the look test, Koko (Sensharma) said to me, aapne Marathi mein jo kiya, usme jaan hai (your delivery in Marathi felt close to life),” says Yadav, 50, the Pune-based Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) employee who frequents Mumbai when an acting gig beckons.

(From right) Shrikant Yadav with director Konkona Sensharma and co-star Amruta Subhash; with Subhash and Tillotama Shome in stills from The Mirror in Lust Stories 2.

He was almost not doing the role. In March last year, headed for the premiere of the Vidya Balan and Shefali Shah-starrer Jalsa, in which he plays an incorruptible havildar (constable), he declined a call for audition. When Subhash called, Yadav couldn’t refuse. “My real husband (actor-director Sandesh Kulkarni) recommended my reel husband,” laughs Subhash, who met Sensharma through Sandesh, too. The latter played a cop in Nikkhil Advani’s Mumbai Diaries 26/11 (2021) in which Sensharma essayed a doctor’s role.

Sensharma, despite running a temperature, sat Yadav down and “read out the script to me, visualised the scenes, showed me how Kamal would be,” says Yadav, who hadn’t known about Lust Stories 1 until then. There was initial apprehension, though he’s done similar scenes in Marathi cinema, “it helped to have Amruta around. And Koko jitni achhi writer, director, actor hai, usse kayi zyada achhi insaan hai (she’s a good human being above all else). Being an actor herself, Koko guided us in eking out the exact expressions,” he adds.

Sensharma has words of praise, too. “Shrikant looked kind and dignified. I’d seen Jalsa, but his role was nothing like what I wanted. This is essentially the story of two women for which I needed an actor who can hold his own. Kamal needed to have a strength of character, not a wishy-washy one,” she says.

Yadav’s Shrikant and Subhash’s Seema also normalise the access to sex on screen for average Indian bodies. “During the intimate scenes, there was nobody in the room, just the two of us and the cameraperson (Anand Bansal, one of the DoPs on the 2023 Oscar-winner The Elephant Whisperers, and on Achal Mishra’s Maithili films Gamak Ghar and Dhuin). My gut said that I was doing some good work. It’s about lust but also about privacy, space and so much more. Had it been a male director, he’d have taken lust into the direction of vaasna (lasciviousness),” says Yadav. The other segments in the anthology prove him right.

“Kamal is a person with a pure heart. Because Shrikant essayed him sensitively, people are watching sensitively, too,” says Subhash. She and Yadav go back a long way. The two first worked in Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar’s Marathi film Badha (2006).

“Sure we are good friends,” says Subhash, “but doing this intimate role required to be more than just being friends, because both are vulnerable. When you are doing the act, during the shoot, it is a different kind of vulnerability. Whatever happens between the two actors, even we won’t be able to talk about it. It helped that Shrikant had a fatherly, protective energy and eased me into the act. We had met at Koko’s place, in her bedroom, and decided to take a day to just talk about it, and being okay with it. Whatever inhibitions we had, we overcame it. We decided the positions and the camera angles, mostly technical variations. (DoP) Anand has this knack for dissolving into the background, after a point we forgot that he’s in the room, and could perform stress-free. Our dignity was kept intact.”

“It was so hectic for me, mentally, emotionally and, most of all, physically. I used to stress out to perform the orgasm scene all of a sudden. Kanta (what Shrikant’s friends call him) would massage my legs, offer me water now and then. It wasn’t his job but he’d keep checking if I was doing okay. Small, kind gestures. The way he lifts my legs in the scene is so delicate and gentle, he’s not clutching on to them. A woman knows good energy from bad energy,” Subhash adds.

Amruta Subhash, Shrikant Yadav and Tillotama Shome in 'The Mirror' from 'Lust Stories 2'.

Isheeta’s unconscious is a powerful force controlling her voyeuristic behaviour, as if a certain floodgate has been opened, snowballing of desires hitherto kept in the backburner. Her unconscious triggers Seema’s conscious, makes her aware of and respond to the external stimuli through exhibitionism. Between this give and take of the conscious and unconscious stands the liminal Kamal, unaware of the sensorium. His consent isn’t taken, he’s appalled at the game in which he’s made an inadvertent pawn of, and yet, he is the devoted husband who understands his wife’s sexual fulfilment and accepts her transgression.

Is he a feminist man? The feminist lens with which a lot of audiences and critics have watched and appreciated the short film wasn’t the looking glass that the director was gazing through. “He’s a decent human being, and he understands sexual fulfilment. Kamal and Seema have a good marriage. He doesn’t have a vested interest like Isheeta does. Or Seema, eventually. Seema has taken a huge risk, because it is her workplace. But this is not to absolve him, he, too, has taken a risk. He says we shouldn’t have done it. He asks the most pertinent questions, and thus he’s the moral conscience of the film. I wanted the interplay between the two women and a man who’ll be able to stand up to it,” says Sensharma.

Amruta Subhash and Shrikant Yadav in a still from 'The Mirror' on 'Lust Story 2'.

“He could understand my vulnerability as a woman,” Subhash adds. Kamal’s character went beyond gender. His acceptance as a husband gave Seema the confidence to emote, to be able to respond to him when he asks: “tereko majja aata thha kya? (You enjoyed, didn’t you?)” Seema is disturbed that he’s not speaking with her, she’s protective of Kamal, who’s the softer partner, and she’s worried that her transgression has hurt him, but when he confronts her, he emotes the vulnerability of a man. The kiss after that is not violent, it’s gentle and reassuring. Subhash says, “I’m glad that he got to play a different role than what he normally does. I had really liked him in Deool (2011). In Killa (2014) too, our equation was good. He’s a gentleman who tries to help me but unwittingly lands me in trouble and is sad about that.”

The first time this non-Marathi writer noticed Yadav was in Arun Fulara’s observational short film Sunday (2020), and then in Reema Maya’s 2023 Sundance-premiered short Nocturnal Burger, in which he plays a disparaging, patriarchal cop. Yadav brings a certain soft masculinity even to his negative roles. Even as a cop, or a political karyakarta, he plays the person behind the uniform/job and not a stereotypical caricature. In Sunday, he’s a simple, middle-class married man who lives in a chawl and is awakened to his unknown-to-him queer self, and desire for a shave by a particular younger barber at a salon. The short is about little gestures and unexpressed emotions, the beauty and joy in the moment and the aftertaste of the fleeting touch. Sunday is almost a dialogue-less film, Yadav’s character doesn’t have many lines, “he emotes exclusively with his face and body, something he does brilliantly,” says Fulara. In The Mirror, too, it is the shock on Kamal’s face, as he stands next to the lift, and the truth is revealed in the climactic moment. That look stays with you much after the anthology has ended. Or the smirk when Seema tells him to shave before visiting the next day. Or the acceptance in his eyes when Seema tells him she enjoyed more being watched.

Yadav has been acting for close to two decades. “I have been a huge fan of Shrikant’s work ever since I had seen him in Umesh Kulkarni’s Deool. And then, when I got to work with him on (director Devashish Makhija’s) Ajji and Bhonsle, my admiration for him as an actor and a person grew exponentially,” says Fulara, to whom the actor came first and then the story idea for Sunday, not the other way around. “He doesn’t need much direction. All I had to clarify to him was that we are not depicting lust, but the cute emotion of one-sided crush that we’ve all experienced as teenagers, and he got it spot on.”

In The Mirror too, Kamal is a simple guy who’s working hard to provide for his family and see them happy. “I rely on the director,” says Yadav, “I believe drama is an actor’s medium while cinema is a director’s medium. How much, to what extent and how to paint an actor is what the director decides.”

Shrikant Yadav and Amruta Subhash with their onscreen children on the set of 'The Mirror'.

Yadav has a theory. According to him a film’s treatment differs if the director is solely a director (Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni), an actor turned director (Sensharma), a cameraperson turned director (Avinash Arun, Killa) or a writer turned director (Girish Kulkarni). “The emphasis will be more on the aspects they have demonstrated an expertise in,” he says, adding, that having worked with women directors and the sensibility they bring to their films, he feels “the industry needs more sensible and sensitive directors and writers.”

A huge credit to building Yadav’s filmography goes to Marathi director Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni, an old friend. Umesh, Girish and Shrikant are close friends from Pune. “In our early 20s, we started an amateur theatre group called Rangamanchiye, in around 1995, to perform experimental plays. We made new plays, not adaptations. Girish wrote them, Girish has written all my films,” says Umesh. Girish later adapted the characters of their 1996 hit drama Prasangopat into his 2017 Marathi film Jaundya na Balasaheb. Yadav has been a constant in both Umesh’s and Girish’s films.

(Clockwise from top, left) Stills from Shrikant Yadav's films 'Deool', 'Ek Hazarachi Note', web-series 'Jalsa', on the poster of the film 'Jaundya Na Balasaheb', backstage on the sets of 'The Mirror' with Amruta Subhash and her actor-director husband Sandesh Kulkarni, on the poster of indie film 'Pinky Aur Papa', and in a still from 2023 Sundance short film 'Nocturnal Burger'.

Cinema, however, was a later entry into Yadav’s life though he enjoyed watching them. Yadav used to do mimicry and wanted to take up theatre when he was in Class X. Eventually, he did the play Tukaram. In 1988, he signed up for year-long workshops of natyabhinaya, at Bharat Natya Sanshodhan Mandir, for two hours daily after college. In 1999-2000, he was in the second-last batch of actors in a workshop with Satyadev Dubey. Amruta Subhash and Sonali Kulkarni were in his class, too.

Mechanical engineering graduates Yadav joined BSNL in 1998 and Girish landed up in Radio Mirchi. The two continued with theatre on the side. “It helps to have a government job. Because I’ve been a diligent worker, they support me when I take leaves to go on shoots,” he says. His acting also comes in handy for BSNL’s marketing. “In 2019-22, my serial Raja Rani Chi Ga Jodi for Colours Marathi became a huge hit, even in the villages. I felt like a celebrity when I went on visits,” adds Yadav, who once got Rs 1,000 for a day of shoot in 2004 and today can command around Rs 50,000 a day.

“Shrikant has always played a supportive role in my life. He’s acted in and handled the production for my FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) short films Darshan (2003) and Girni (2004) and my first feature film Valu (2008),” says Umesh. Years before he joined FTII in 2000, a 17-year-old Umesh assisted Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar on Doghi (1995) as their assistant director, and so, when the feted Marathi director duo were making Badha, Kulkarni recommended his friends.

Yadav loves a “total package film”, which has comedy, drama, a little of everything. Among his desires is to work with director Vidhu Vinod Chopra. He’s done ample films with actor Nana Patekar, including the entertainer-with-a-message Deool. Section 375 (2019) with Akshaye Khanna. As a political karyakarta (worker) in Highway Ek Selfie Aarpar (2015) with Huma Qureshi. Ajoba (2014) with Urmila Matondkar. In the OTT series Breathe season 1 (2018) with Madhavan and The Family Man (2019) with Manoj Bajpayee. In Daddy (2017), he played a gangster. He plays the toxic husband of the central character in Ravi Jadhav’s indie film Nude. He was in Ek Hazarachi Note (2014), the first Marathi film to land on Netflix. “I have done cop roles, I have done simple roles, I’ve played an angry young man, comic man who switches into a narcissist in Raja Rani Chi Ga Jodi. I did a lot of short films though there is a certain freedom which I find in TV serials. Jo main nahin hoon woh dikhane mein challenge zyada hai, mazaa aata hai (it’s challenging and exciting to depict what I am not),” he says.

In a still from Marathi film 'Deool' (2011).

“Valu, Vihir (2009), Deool, Highway…in our films, there’s never any complete lead role or a hero per se, there are many characters. Given a chance, he (Yadav) is very capable of playing the lead. He has really grown as an actor. He quickly learnt acting for cinema by his own dedication and adapted as a screen actor. As a human being, he has a lovely heart, he’s childlike, looks at everything with curiosity, he observes keenly and is always up for improvisation,” says Umesh.

Umesh’s biggest gripe with Hindi films and shows is the fate of Marathi actors who almost always end up in cop roles, or as gangsters and corrupt politicians. “I feel very sad seeing Marathi actors being cast as cops in Hindi films. In (Anurag Kashyap’s) Ugly, Girish is a police officer too, though he gets screen time and gets noticed (Girish was also seen as a cop in the 2023 Malayalam film Thankam). Marathi actors are capable of doing several kinds of roles. But they don’t have a choice with the kind of roles being offered to them, and that limits their talent. Hindi projects don’t do justice to their talent,” says Umesh, who’s working on a Hindi fiction web-series currently. Does Yadav feel the stagnation of being repeat-cast in cop roles? “Police role mein rehke bhi alag alag characters karta hun (I try to bring variety to my various police-officer roles),” he says, “In Jalsa, I was a havildar who’s never taken a bribe in his life.”

Yadav has been processing the praise coming at him from all directions. “I’ve heard that Anurag (Kashyap, director) doesn’t praise easily, but he sent me a message: ‘Bhai, gazab acting in Lust Stories 2’,” says Yadav, who’ll be next seen in Kashyap’s latest, the Cannes-premiered Sunny Leone and Rahul Bhatt-starrer Kennedy. Yet again, as a cop.