Not 'Maja Ma': Madhuri Dixit’s talent remains unused because of her bad film choices

Anand Tiwari’s Maja Ma streaming on Prime Video is a well-intentioned film gone wrong. The theme hinging on a married Indian middle-class woman’s need to conceal her sexual preference for three decades is progressive. However, it is the treatment and story that misfire badly. 

Dixit suffers a badly written role

Half-baked characters with phony accents, an inexplicably desperate need to incorporate the odd comic sequence and regressive manifestations of conservative mindsets result in a film with confused priorities. The person who suffers the most shines in her badly written role and occupies the centre stage is Madhuri Dixit.

Since her reappearance in 2007 after a five-year break, Dixit has, for the most part, given her best effort in regular Hindi films. It hasn’t helped that she has only seldom worked.

Capable of taking on tough challenges

Dixit is capable of taking on tough challenges like she did when she played the role of a cunning and greedy widowed begum in Abhishek Chaubey’s smartly directed black comedy Dedh Ishqiya (2014). Her performance in Dedh Ishqiya was a statement of her acting capability that revealed itself in the right context, resulting in a critically acclaimed film. 

Notwithstanding her stature, Dixit works in an industry which makes Rs 100 crore-plus films for 50-plus men who play much younger characters. 

Audiences gravitate to the theaters and watch some of these male-centric films that appeal to them. Fifty-five today, she has left her days as a megastar who played the female lead in big-budget blockbusters far behind. 

Dixit’s appeal as a dancer performing on-screen has declined considerably. But she is a brilliant actress who can enhance a film’s appeal manifold — if it is well-directed and has a good story. 

Sadly, the reality graph of her post-sabbatical Bollywood career shows that she has rarely got it right while signing on the dotted line. She was seen in the supporting role of a courtesan in Abhishek Varman’s Kalank (2019), whose story unfolds in Husnabad in Lahore in the pre-Independence era. 

Playing a character whose past is a pivotal character in the romantic drama, Dixit sparkled in some sequences that revealed the outstanding performer in her. But she had to surrender the limelight to younger actors like Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt in a film that failed to move the viewer like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the master craftsman of emotionally powerful spectacle, would have done. 

Dixit also ventured towards comic territory with Indra Kumar’s Total Dhamaal, a masala film with formidable acting talents, including Anil Kapoor, who played her husband and partner in action, Ajay Devgn, Boman Irani and Arshad Warsi. 

The film’s gifted star cast, plus its front-row-friendly laughter-inducing moments, turned Total Dhamaal into a box-office success. Playing an effervescent woman whose marriage is on the rocks – and who is on a wild gold chase with her husband — hers was a spontaneous performance that the average viewer loved. 

However the problem was that Total Dhamaal (2019) is the kind of film that most of us watch to seek momentary enjoyment and forget easily.  

Choices matter 

Having shown what the power of superstardom could achieve when she was at her peak — she managed to attract viewers even with her bad films. Dixit could have chosen the path of evolution as an actor after returning to films in 2007. It is unlikely that she didn’t get good scripts, considering her well-known ability to turn a moment into a memory. 

The more likely possibility is that she made wrong choices, resulting in a handful of unremarkable films. The loosely scripted Anil Mehta-helmed Aaja Nachle (2007), her first film after a sabbatical in which she plays a woman who returns to her Indian hometown from New York to try and save her dance academy from getting demolished, impressed few. 

Soumik Sen’s Gulaab Gang (2014), which was expected to be a memorable Dixit-Juhi Chawla clash before release, guillotined the possibility of creating an engaging film. Seen in the role of the leader of a gang of women that takes up the cause of the downtrodden, Dixit was eclipsed by Chawla, who impressed as a ruthless politician. The film capsized at the box office, which surprised nobody.

Madhuri Dixit’s appeal cannot be determined by the statistics of box office performance. However, many of her fans would be disappointed at her inability to reinvent herself at a time when mainstream Bollywood is more adventurous than earlier.

Dixit can deliver excellent outcomes, but only if she chooses scripts that challenge her artistically — which may not be easy.

The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed are personal.

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