Happy Birthday Taapsee Pannu: Eight Times The Actress Wowed The Audiences With Her Unique And Courageous Choices
It's Taapsee Pannu's birthday today. And we cannot find a better day to appreciate and admire the talent this pretty actress is. On this occasion, Subhash K Jha lists what he feels are the courageous choices made by the actress, with which she completely floored her audiences.
Her choices are unique. Her performances eschew artificiality. She is a breath of fresh air. They don’t make ‘em like her. Not any more. When it comes to making unconventional choices the closest parallel I can find to Taapsee Pannu is the yesteryears’ actress Tanuja - who chose not what would make her a star but roles that opened up new ways for a female hero to express herself.
On the occasion of Taapsee Pannu's birthday, here's a list of courageous choices made by the actress, with which she completely floored her audiences.
BABY (2014): She had only a cameo in this espionage drama. But she broke the glass ceiling and a lot else when she played the warrior queen Shabana Khan ready to take on the most hardened criminals on their own territory. Her hand-to-hand with actor Sushant Singh in a hotel room was to die for.
PINK (2016): Two years after Baby, producer Shoojt Sircar and director Annirudh Roy Chaudhuri cast Taapsee as a casualty of sexual assault who won’t play the victim, won’t stop wearing short dresses, won’t stop drinking if she wishes, just to prove only bad girls get sexually violated. Taapsee was like a coiled-up livewire ready to erupt any time. Any place. Even the courtroom. Contempt not just of the court but all social conventions.
NAAM SHABANA (2017): As an Indian intelligence agent, the myopic script didn’t allow her character to go far enough. Taapsee’s Shabana Khan was cowed down constantly, first by Manoj Bajpai barking orders on the phone and then by Akshay Kumar who insisted on holding her hand and walking her through the action scenes when all Shabana wanted to do was kick some ass. Solo. Given the limitations Taapsee managed to wrap her head around her character’s flaws and make them seem like human traits that we need to conquer to achieve a level of success beyond the prescribed.
BADLAA (2018): Playing the anti-heroine to the hilt, a character so morally twisted she makes every Bad Girl seen in Hindi cinema seem like a kindergarten prankster, Taapsee blew our brains out with her character’s devious mind. To put it in a nutshell, playing an unfaithful wife she gave body to a mind that was dangerous and self-destructive. A truly liberating performance and the film made truckloads of money to boot. Yes!
MANMARZIYAN (2018): Playing a girl who loves having sex in itself such an uncommon thing to do. How did Taapsee agree? Log kya kahenge? Mummy kya kahegi? And how did she get away with hitting the sack without making the moralists train their guns on her?
MULK ( 2018): This time it wasn’t about how much space her character occupied in the script. It was about being part of a project that gave her the freedom to speak about the lack of freedom denied to certain sections of our society. Taapsee played the Hindu daughter-in-law of a Muslim fighting to restore the family’s dignity in court.
GAME OVER (2019): Confined to a wheelchair, no glamorous trappings, no boyfriend tucked away in some corner, playing a hyper-tense chronically suicidal woman suffering from tattoo terror, Taapsee just knocks the ball out of the park.
THAPPAD (2020): Taapsee Pannu brought to her hurt wife’s role a heroic dignity and a distant poignancy that distilled themselves in a performance of screaming silences. I dare any other contemporary actress to equal the sheer persuasive power of Taapsee’s performance.
Image Source: Instagram/taapsee, spotboye archives
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