Happy Birthday Aamir Khan: Raakh, Rangeela And More - Our Favourite Performances By The Superstar

The performances that Aamir Khan likes are not the ones that are his best.In fact the performances which  reveal him to be an actor of substance are  not always  noticed. Here is my pick.

1. Raakh(1989): Just before Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and its silly  boy-next-door  promotional campaign, Aamir Khan  proved himself an actor of volcanic intensity in Raakh, a vigilante film about an angry frustrated young  man named, ahem, Aamir whose girlfriend (Supriya Pathak) is gangraped on the street as he watches helplessly. The film deconstructs  Aamir’s rage and constructs the  character’s revenge in scenes that play themselves out like chronicles of a police  confession: broken, disjointed, seething in injustice. I’ve never seen Aamir scale these heights of implosive indignation ever again. Basu Bhattacharya’s son Aditya who directed Raakh told me Aamir was his  first and only choice even though Aditya had not seen much of Aamir’s work. Gut feeling for a  character who is gutted  from inside.

2. 1947: Earth(1998): Aamir  argued and battled with director Deepa Mehta all through the making of this film. He hated the way his character shaped up. He  hated everything to do  with the film. But as Dil Nawaz the icecream seller  during those troubled months of Partition, who has the hots for the ayah Nandita Das, Aamir gave the most controlled  performance  of his career, bringing out the communalization of  a  perfectly sane amd reasonable man  during the unreasonable  insanity   of   communal  riots. More than  the spoken words  we saw  the change from  gentle soul  to hardliner  in  Aamir’s  body language  and his  incandescent eyes.What a performance! Deepa Mehta still thinks this is Aamir’s best performance  to date.

3. Rangeela(1995): Munna(Aamir Khan) the  tapori in yellow pants, knitted vests, stubborn stubble and cocky caps. It would be seriously wrong to call Munna a goonda. He is more the neighbourhood rowdy Rathore in anything but khaki. Arguably the finest performance of Aamir’s career Munna gave Aamir a chance to let go, to simply have fun with a part without bothering with the earlier and future history  of the character. The scenes were he coaches Urmila to memorize her dialogues for her shooting the next day, show the actor’s gaze melting in unrequited love as he gets ‘in character’.Aamir  actually played the all-giving Chandramukhi from Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Devdas with a sex change. He didn’t have to perform a Mujra to entertain love. The lovelorn looks when Mili isn’t looking(she has her eyes trained to  a distant dream) kept Munna’s character on the level of a street-smart lover-boy without reducing him to a caricature. Munna’s hurt when Mili excitedly walks off in the middle of a lunch date to be with the superstar, was so palpable, we were inclined to shake Mili by her shoulders and point her to the obvious love that flowed out of Munna. Says  director Ram Gopal Varma, “Aamir’s character was based on a street goonda I  knew in Hyderabad. When I narrated Rangeela to Aamir  he immediately agreed. He is an incredibly passionate performer.”

Image source: Imbd