What's Wrong With Juhi?

Juhi Chawla used to be a decent actress... or so I thought. When I saw Bhootnath last week (a lacklustre movie), I was shocked at how silly her acting was. It's as though her hiatus has erased her ability to act. Humorous scenes were especially hard for her; her laughter and generally upbeat chirpiness sounded and looked completely forced.

Certainly it has to do with the quality of direction. Juhi scintillates in 3 Deewarein by Nagesh Kukunoor with a restrained performance in which there is not a nuance out of place. 3 Deewarein is a fairly recent film as well. There's nothing surprising in this phenomenon; another example that comes to mind is Manisha Koirala's great performance in Bombay, directed by Mani Ratnam. She was an ordinary actress throughout the rest of her career, but pulled off a quality performance in that film. Juhi must be facing the same problem.

I think it may also have something to do with losing momentum -- Juhi's been out of touch with acting for quite a while now. Maybe it takes some doing to get back into the swing of things.

A final thought: did Juhi actually get worse, or is 1990s acting generally silly by today's standards? Hindi cinema was vibrant and inventive through the 60s and 70s, but took a terrible dip for the worse in the 80s and early 90s. The drought lasted until the mid-90s, after which cinema came alive again. (Some credit this to the government classification as an industry, leading to much easier financing and less underworld involvement.) I can't really compare though, because I don't have any popular early 90s movies at hand.

Telugu Cinema and Maturity

Something has been wrong with Telugu cinema for a while. A long time ago, especially during the black-and-white era, the films used to be great. The acting was theatrical rather than realistic in those days, but the stories were good and the films were coherent. Sometime in the 70s or 80s, films in the Telugu industry took a turn for the worse. To be fair, this happened to all Indian films... late 80s Hindi films are often unwatchable. But around the end of the 90s, Bollywood began redeeming itself. Most of the films are still incoherent and meaningless, but they began making a few really good ones.

The Telugu industry still seems stuck in the 80s mold of incoherent, shark-jumping plots, gratuitous violence, and songs that are jarringly out of place. Instead of improving, the Telugu industry seems to be getting worse. The violence is more mindless, the plagiarism and stitching together of individual scenes from Hindi and Hollywood films has reached a point where some films feel like incoherent patchwork, and even the Telugu language is being massacred in many of the recent ones. The Telugu industry has also not realized the importance of theme music in a film (i.e. the background score, not the songs).

Examples of this include Pokiri, which is full of unrealistic and meaningless violence. Maaya Bazaar, a recent film (not related to the original), is a movie with a decent idea but is poorly directed, full of maudlin sermonizing and silly fight scenes. Aite is a recent film with a good idea but ordinary execution and very poorly spoken Telugu. Gajani is a rip-off of the Hollywood movie Memento, but is poorly executed and seems a little irrelevant in the Indian situation.

Perhaps it is silly to blame the industry, which is simply producing what the people want. But I believe it must be possible to make a popular film that is also good from a theoretical, critical viewpoint. Bollywood has done it, and the Tamil industry is following suit. That Telugu cinema can do it is evidenced by the large number of excellent movies produced in the past, and the occasional blips of excellence like Godavari. It is time Telugu cinema pulled itself out of the 1980s morass.