Vicky Kaushal and a new middle cinema for millennials

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke has made Rs 46.27 crore over nine days in theatres. (Images via Instagram/VickyKaushal09)

In a scene from Laxman Utekar’s Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, Kapil, played by the charming Vicky Kaushal, acts part-cocky part-cheap by paying a roadside eatery attendant a Re 1 tip. In a blunt little twist, the young boy gives Kapil the coin back, as a comment on his thriftiness. “Main apna dekh lunga,” the boy says, to which Kapil offers neither anger nor reconciliation. He instead gladly picks up the coin and leaves.

Kaushal’s latest feels like a sequel to his Netflix film Love Per Square Foot. Built around the premise of a young millennial couple’s desire for private space, however, Zara Hatke Zara Bachke takes the Baghban route instead, to return them to the abstract prison of the Indian joint family.

Kaushal, however, is delightful; a sober, un-imposing presence, he recedes into the unassuming fabric of a world that no longer allows heroes to emerge with ease or aplomb. Much like Amol Palekar in the '70s, and much like the millennials today trying to make sense of the shore from the sea, this is a new kind of middle cinema.

In Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, Kaushal plays a yoga teacher plying his trade in Indore. He is married to Saumya (an acceptable Sarah Ali Khan), a chemistry teacher who dreams bigger and better than her partner. Both live in the house that belongs to Kapil’s father and yearn for a private space of their own where romance and maybe even lust, can be practiced freely and fairly.

Their plan to get out of this economically imposed rut is to hack a government scheme by pretending to get divorced. Chaos, errors and some harmless comedy ensues, as Kaushal holds together the film through his sheer, self-deprecating charm. He is never quite the loser, but simply a plucky underdog bogged down by eccentricities.

In Disney+Hotstar’s Govinda Naam Mera, Kaushal played an aspiring choreographer, trying to break free of a semi-toxic marriage. Infidelity and abuse are part of the canvas here, but the actor’s ability to exhibit vulnerability as a symptom of design as opposed to destiny, manages to exact a light-hearted comedy. In Love Per Square Foot, Sanjay’s (Kaushal) considerations, the grammar of the film feel far more self-serious and yet Kaushal boasts the kind of tender exterior through which you can distil your own concerns about modern life, its imposing and, at times, intimidating geometry. The desire for a personal space, after all, is universal, especially in a country that is increasingly becoming crowded.

Kaushal is a director’s actor, having tried an entire bouquet of roles from heroic militarism (Uri: The Surgical Strike) to horror (Bhoot: The Haunted Ship) via the odd biopic or two (Sardar Udham). In his comedies, however, he echoes the everyman antiquity of the Palekar of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films. Where conflicts are modest yet intimate, challenges echo the complexity of deft social manoeuvres and villains emerge from the unremarkable. Where masculinity thrives through the comfort of self-assurance rather than the necessity of territorial symbolism. Across his three rom-coms, the actor has played a man regularly tripped by men and women around him with bemusement plastered to his face. All the more impressive since sandwiched in-between these roles are grim, moving performances like Sardar Udham and Manmarziyaan.

India’s middle cinema, a euphemism for the urban young in the '70s, has quietly been enveloped by the edgy, quirky theatrics of small towns of late. Kaushal’s rom-coms, however, claw at concerns and anxieties that most millennials in this country would relate to, especially through their language of compliance and surrender. In one film, he chases a Mumbai home with the romantic ideal of viewing it as the climax to his story. It’s young India’s dream. In another he fantasizes about space as a form of escape. In Govinda Naam Mera, he orchestrates a coup, so he can finally make the kind of art that he wishes to. In all three, he is never quite the loser, but merely the man trying to battle on the fronts of luck and leverage. Winning here merely rids him of obligations, as opposed to reincarnating him as the controller of his own self-will. No heroes are cast or born in his films.

Comparisons with Palekar and middle cinema of the '70s are natural here but yet to comply with the wider canvas of the industry. With the heroic figure waning – despite Pathaan – in the imagination of the Hindi audience, Kaushal’s work isn’t exactly a rebuttal nor does it function as a critique of the immensity of the hero. It does, however, speak to a specific audience. Ironically, the actor himself is imposingly built, and yet disappears under the skin of characters written to evoke the ordinary. It’s a trait we millennials most concur with, this ability and possibly desire to disappear in our urban forests. Allow our battles to become the dotted line either side of which, Hindi cinema writes self-serving, fetishized homages of social and romantic conquest. On that dotted line, however, like Kapil and Sanjay, we are simply trying to hold the pages of our lives from spiralling away from each other. Dreaming frugally, living unexceptionally.