Per la talentuosa Alia Bhatt il 2022 segna il decimo anno di carriera, un invidiabile percorso professionale contrassegnato da successi - solo un paio di passi falsi - sia di pubblico che di critica. Diverse testate indiane hanno dedicato ampio spazio alla giovane attrice. Vi segnalo alcuni articoli:
- Is there anything Alia Bhatt can’t do?, Kaveree Bamzai, Open, 15 agosto 2022:
'Alia [Bhatt] always wanted to be a Hindi film heroine. Her father [Mahesh Bhatt] insists her upbringing was not “filmi”. Alia agrees, “I didn’t grow up on a film set. I knew my parents would go away for a while but it was only much later that I realised my father was related to movies and my mother [Soni Razdan] did theatre and TV shows. Growing up, I remember they would play a lot of music, there would be music sittings for movies. But my relationship with acting started with television. I was in my own la la land, watching Karisma Kapoor, Govinda, David Dhawan movies. I would watch Ekta Kapoor’s TV series such as Kasautii Zindagii Kay. I discovered Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema much later. But by the age of four, I had decided to become an actor.” She was seven when she saw Zakhm (1998) and sent her stepsister Pooja Bhatt a note on it. “I remember Pooja telling me she was stunned by her sensitivity at that age,” says Mahesh Bhatt.
As a child, she got many offers to be an actor. “But my mum wanted me to live the life of a child, and not start so young,” she says. When she was nine, her mother took her to [Sanjay Leela] Bhansali to audition for the role of the young girl in Black (2005) that finally went to Ayesha Kapur. “My mum was very keen on me being part of his movies. I had no clue I was going to that meeting. It was only when we were entering Sanjay Sir’s building that she told me. It was where I met Ranbir for the first time. He was taking pictures of me, very eager, being the assistant. I remember Bhansali telling my mother, ‘This girl will be a heroine one day.’ (...) Life does not go according to plan. And sometimes, as women, we forget to define who we are in our own roles. (...) The way I’ve chosen my roles, the timing for my film releases, nothing has been planned. I got married at 29 - I thought I would not get married until much later. Very early on, in my career and personal life, I realised you had to go with what happens naturally, to go with your gut feeling, to go with what feels right as opposed to what you think is right.”
Her greatest gift is her intuitive ability to understand a script, says her mother, actor Soni Razdan. (...) “Student of the Year hadn’t come out but there was something about this child-woman that struck me. I offered her the role of Veera in Highway and asked her to read the script,” he [Imtiaz Ali] says. She did, and loved it, though she was apprehensive about being in every scene of the movie. “My team was not convinced though,” says Ali, and he asked her to the office one day to tell them the story of Highway as she understood it. They were blown away,” he says.
Gauri Shinde, who directed her in Dear Zindagi (2016), says she has everything one needs to be a great actor, “She is damn real, unafraid to show vulnerability both onscreen and offscreen; highly sensitive and intuitive at such a young age; is sharply focused on her craft; and has a natural charm, energy and honesty that is so appealing that one can’t help but fall in love with her.” She also has the gift of listening, says her Darlings director Jasmeet K. Reen. “When you tell her about the character, you can see her mentally taking notes. Even in readings, she just reads without expression. When the camera starts, she just explodes,” says Reen. (...) Her mother says Alia has a photographic memory that helps her in her performances. (...)
When she finally did get a role in a Bollywood movie, she was 17. It was after a series of auditions and Alia still remembers going to meet [Karan] Johar in his office after she was selected. “I was still in my school uniform,” she says. Johar remembers it slightly differently. (...) “I had met her when she was very tiny because she would come to the film set as Bhatt Sahib has directed two films for my dad. I had not kept in touch. Then I called up her mom and asked whether I could have a meeting. By then, we had auditioned 300 girls for the lead in Student of the Year. Alia walked in and she was really chubby and cute. She had come in her school uniform (...) and we chatted. There was something extraordinary about her. After that, she did the audition and it was amazing,” he says. He then told her he would want her to get into workshops for fitness and acting. Three months later, when they did photo shoots, he knew she was a “bona fide movie star”. He feels she is the finest actor in the country currently, and he means both men and women. Razdan acknowledges his role - he is really like her second father, she says. (...)
Until Student of the Year happened, Razdan says the family was all set to send Alia to the UK or the US for a year’s acting course. She remembers holding Alia’s hand for the first two years of her career, because she was so young. But after the initial phase, Alia took her own calls, says the mother. How different is her stardom from that of her immediate predecessors, the troika of Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma and Katrina Kaif? Unlike them, she is not a particularly gifted dancer. (...) Unlike the three of them who relied on the Khans for their initial stardom, she didn’t have that choice because of her physiognomy. So, either by choice or coincidence, she challenged the Khan patriarchy. Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi featured Shah Rukh Khan, but in an avuncular cameo. Luck and timing are also on her side. She is in the industry at a time when stories are the priority. (...)
Alia’s stardom is also carefully constructed as a conversation with the audience on social media. When her first appearance on Koffee with Karan revealed her lack of general knowledge, she converted it into an opportunity and made “dumb” her calling card. In 2014, the popular YouTube channel, AIB, collaborated with her to create a video called “Genius of the Year”, a spoof of the event. (...) Around the same time, Alia received both critical acclaim and commercial success for her performance in Highway followed by Udta Punjab (directed by Abhishek Chaubey, 2016), and later, Raazi (Meghna Gulzar, 2018). Suddenly, from an entitled star kid she came to be seen as a real actor. (...)
She lets the world (with 68.3 million followers) into her life with Instagram. It is very different in the case of both Deepika and Anushka, whose stardom was more controlled, the lines between personal and private clearly drawn. (...) Add to that a careful balance of commercial cinema and middle-of-the-road movies. (...) And there is a burgeoning career that keeps her priority front and centre, the desire to entertain. For Alia, the last 10 years have gone by very fast. “When I’ve made a mistake, I’ve moved on. I don’t reflect too much, nothing happens for a second time. It’s a different day, a different step. There’s still a lot of work to do, especially now. Maybe, I have the ability to make things happen. I can make a film like Darlings, act in it, co-produce it. I like the idea of showcasing a new director and a new script. That has always been the endeavour. I loved the experience of putting together Darlings, from okaying the script, to working on the story, to the way the film is presented. It makes me so proud to see the human spirit in collaboration. I love that dynamic,” she says. (...) Alia’s heritage is multicultural. On her father’s side, a Muslim grandmother and a Gujarati Hindu grandfather; and on her mother’s side, a Kashmiri Pandit grandfather and a German grandmother. (...) Alia has the thirst to do much more, says her father. She’s looking beyond the horizon. In a battered Bollywood, perhaps her cooperative way of working will usher in a new era'.
- Aila, Alia!, Mayank Shekhar, Mid-Day, 20 agosto 2022. Il testo include il video dell'intervista integrale:
'[Udta Punjab] Bhatt recalls her trainer [Pankaj Tripathi], whom she’d meet every day, mastering body language, Jharkhandi dialect, down to how her character sits on haunches for hours. It’s the only time in her career that Bhatt confesses she went “method” on herself. Meaning, abandoned cell-phone, never stepped out of hotel room, consumed no entertainment, spent time interacting/empathising with local youth, never switched on the TV, and simply marinated in the character, until the shoot ended. Why? Because she wanted to prove she was “a chameleon as an actor.” To whom? To herself, she says. (...) She had in fact read the said script, through Shahid Kapoor, her co-actor in the romantic fantasy, 'Shaandaar' (2015), that they were shooting at the time. She actively went up to [Abhishek] Chaubey, asking him to consider her for the battered female lead. The initial look-test didn’t wholly convince him either. She even learnt to play hockey for a month, which is only part of the character’s back-story, not even in the film. The effort totally matches the outcome. Although she says, “There is a part [of me] that says I won’t do it again; of course, never say never. I only played that part for 20 days, which was great. I don’t know how I would have survived it for, say, 60 days.” (...)
With Gangubai, Bhatt reveals about Bhansali being the performative inspiration: “I took so much of Sir’s personality and put that into Gangubai’s character - the way he speaks, thinks, has a certain attitude. (...) Because it is in his head. Film is the director’s medium. And then it’s the written word. The actor has to collect all those things and place it in front of the camera.” (...)
“I am very open to people’s opinions. That is the only way a person learns. But there is [this] humbling part [in my personality] that also comes with my upbringing, and the people around me. I am not the first member of my own fan club. I do not believe the sun shines out of my backside. I genuinely believe I am here to do a job, and must continue to do it well, which is a by-product of a lot of people doing their job well. It is not just me. I value that. (...) I recently realised that I have literally not been a ‘present’ friend for 10 years. And they let me be ‘unpresent’, because they knew I was chasing something. And you have to make sacrifices to try and get what you want. I have the same [set of] nine friends I went to (...) school with. At the end of the day, I feel most comfortable with them. There is a certain version of myself that I have to be in a public space, which I don’t, in their company. What matters to them is me, being me. That’s very grounding. The reason I have not lost them, is because of them. Because they have been so understanding, supportive.” (...)
Here’s Bhatt, the actor, with a house, car, checked, before 21; Bollywood debut before 20; started a film company, and then married, and is even expecting a child, before she turns 30! Is she following some timeline - yes/no/maybe?
Bhatt says, “Contrary to the character in Darlings, I don’t have a list. I have never had a plan. In fact, I used to think I will get married very late. I was one of those girls, who didn’t really talk about marriage much. But it is totally different, when you fall deeply in love, and you also feel like, okay, no, you want to get into that next point of your life. That happened very naturally with Ranbir [Kapoor]. I don’t know why. It just happened. And I am not feeling like my work will stop, pause, or change. I will continue to work till the very end. But that [raising a family] section of your life is something that you have to give your time and energy to. It is not going to happen by itself.” As for manifesting life events, here’s something that can’t be denied about her relationship with her now-husband, Ranbir Kapoor. Over the past decade, pick up any interview, especially the rapid-fire round type stuff that’s common on YouTube chats. Every time she’s been asked about a crush, someone she’d like to date on-screen, etc - inevitably, her answer has been Ranbir Kapoor. Which is mildly strange, since both of them had been dating other people, all through. It’s almost like she set her eyes on this guy, and simply announced to the world that that’s the one she’s gonna end up with. Bhatt laughs, “You know, it is really weird. I was saying it as a regular ‘cute girl’. I was not actually chasing Ranbir on the side, or plotting to get Ranbir; none of that was happening. The fact that I was saying it obviously means I was not thinking about it. Sometimes when you think about it, you never say it. It is beautiful how it naturally worked out, when we started working together on Brahmāstra. For the longest time, we were socially meeting each other. But we had our own lives. There was no interaction, nothing. There was not even a friendship. I could not even call Ranbir a friend. But it naturally happened on that one flight to Tel Aviv, when we both were not seeing anybody. Both of us were single. Both of us were like, ‘Oh my God, what were we doing all these years?’ ‘Why aren’t we together?’ It was a question he kinda asked me. I was like, ‘I don’t know!’ So that’s what I was talking about. You cannot plan something like this”.'
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