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Sridevi herself was famously sheepish about speaking of her process, instead abiding by the maxim that the work should speak for itself, as she told the journalist Vir Sanghvi in a television interview in July 2017. She belonged to a generation of actors in Tamil cinema like Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth who rose to fame in the ’70s and had their fingers on the pulse of the audience’s fundamental desires, reaching out to viewers without resorting to hollow theatrics. Lacking formal training, Sridevi possessed a beguiling mix of technique and impulse. She inhabits Shashi rather than condescending to her, such that the character’s naïveté never rings false.
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Such gestures involve actorly discipline, but Sridevi further endows them with spontaneity. It’s a flicker of a moment, only seconds long, yet Sridevi’s glance carries the weight of a cruel marital dynamic that has imprisoned her. Later in the film, her husband casually jokes before a crowd that his wife was born to make laddoos. One can detect the exact moment when she feels the sting of his insult, her eyes welling up with humiliation. Shashi’s smile dissolves into a frown with shocking speed. When the family learns that she’ll be flying to America alone, Shashi’s son (Shivansh Kotia) begs to accompany her her husband, dripping with disdain, scoffs that his son will be consigned to a life of cooking at home like Shashi does. Her reactive moments register with volcanic strength. Sridevi’s eyes, which one character poetically describes as “two drops of coffee on a cloud of milk,” make their own declarations. She speaks with a tremulous lilt, her tone carefully conveying a sense of displacement. Neither path is blandly linear, though, this precision a result of Sridevi’s meticulous performance. On paper, both trajectories risk trafficking in treacly, inspirational uplift. Shashi’s journey to fluency coincides with an inner blossoming: she learns to love herself. A trip to New Jersey for a family wedding, her first time in America, plants an idea in her head: out of the gaze of her immediate family, she begins to sneak away to New York City to take English lessons, in hopes of proving her doubters wrong.
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Shashi is discontent with the idea of domestic confinement, though. Her inability to speak English, which those two family members take as evidence of her simplemindedness, makes her an easy object of mockery. She is taken for granted by her boorish husband (Adil Hussain) and her bratty daughter (Navika Kotia). Sridevi is Shashi Godbole, a diffident-but not weak-housewife in the state of Maharashtra, who runs a booming dessert business from her home. Sridevi in English Vinglish (Courtesy of Hope Productions) English Vinglish is an ideal introduction for those unacquainted with Sridevi’s talents, showcasing how different schools of acting from North and South Indian cinemas could converge in a single performance. Sridevi’s hiatus seemed to unlock an entirely different side of a performer whom Hindi cinema had misused. The film accents its central character, dimming any surrounding artifice. Shinde’s script for English Vinglish reportedly coaxed Sridevi out of her 15-year semi-retirement, giving her a role reminiscent of her South Indian, pre-Bollywood era. Looking at her filmography during this period, one could still conclude that Hindi cinema never quite gave her the roles that plumbed the depth of her talent. Still, she went on to become the nation’s first pan- Indian female superstar, reigning over the country’s three biggest film industries-Kollywood (Tamil), Tollywood (Telugu), and Bollywood (Hindi)-before retiring in 1997. That she excelled in such circumstances constitutes a minor miracle. Like Himmatwala, too many of these movies refused to take her seriously, rarely giving her the chance to dig beneath the surfaces of the women she portrayed. She climbed to the top of Bollywood in the ’80s and ’90s, perhaps popular Hindi cinema’s most artistically sterile period. She essayed a variety of roles with tender honesty in Tamil when she was just a teenager: a village belle who experiences heartbreak ( 16 Vayathinile, 1977), a lonely singer who loves a con man ( Johnny, 1980), a woman who suffers from amnesia ( Moondram Pirai, 1982). By then she was already a force in South India, with the majority of her work in the languages of Tamil and Telugu. She was only 19 when she appeared in Himmatwala. Sridevi, who died in 2018 at 54, had been acting since she was 4, eschewing an education for a childhood spent on film sets. Can Dialectics Break Bricks? By Devika Girish