They said Alia Bhatt did ‘Kalank’ to impress Sanjay Leela Bhansali so he can take her in one of his films. True enough, even before ‘Kalank’ released and flopped, SLB announced Alia as his next heroine in a film titled ‘Insha Allah’ opposite Salman Khan.
The film got shelved after SLB couldn’t tolerate Salman’s meddling in and acting an actual Bhai forcing SLB to hire his people, including actresses of his choice and his brother-in-law in the supporting characters. Soon after, SLB announced a fresh and new collaboration with Alia Bhatt in a film titled ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi’ based on the book ‘Mafia Queens of Mumbai’. Many assumed that it was to save face from the first project being shelved as Aloo’s papa KJo really hyped this collaboration up. You know how much he loves his first daughter!
Come to think of it, this year he won’t have his chat shows to hype Aloo up like he did with ‘Raazi’.
After almost a year being in production, SLB & co. finally released the teaser of ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi’ in honor of his birthday. And after seeing it, Alia should have never done ‘Kalank’ as both stories and her characters in them are worlds apart. In ‘Insha Allah’, her pairing with Salman would have been disastrous as he was playing an older man falling in love with her. With that in mind, we were all under the impression that this film was going to be as horrible as ‘Kalank’ but based on the teaser, it’s not!
Strange enough, today is also the birth date of the late Jayalalithaa and to celebrate that Kangana Ranaut & co. released a preview of the biopic she has been working on based on the life of the iron lady.
So, SLB released the teaser of Gangu and Kangu released a preview of her film!
Teaser of ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi’:
The teaser looks good. Good enough to generate the hype required for an SLB film. Alia Bhatt has changed herself a lot for this film. You can see it in the teaser. It explains why she has been looking a lot older for the past year or so. Even her voice doesn’t sound like a child in the teaser and her body language too. We see bits of Pooja Bhatt in her. Obviously, since SLB is directing this you can expect perfection instead of wannabe shots.
The film, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, is based on the life of Gangubai Kathiawadi, who was a sex worker but later emerged as an underworld don in Mumbai. – NDTV
Gangubai is the story of a young girl, which explains why SLB took Alia and not any other matured actress. You can argue and say there are many dozens of young actresses like Alia. Yes, there are and there’s nothing wrong in thinking like that.
Even when SLB took Rani Mukerji in ‘Black’, many thought why a commercial actress instead of an actress known for her craft. But SLB worked both AB Snr and Rani hard that they came out with award-winning performances. So did Aishwarya in both ‘Devdas’ and ‘HDDCS’. Maybe SLB does like working with commercial actresses. If Alia choose to work with him despite knowing what he is like on the sets, good for her. She was really looking for the experience. Both Sonam and Ranbir stayed away from working with SLB after ‘Sawaariya’ so you can only imagine what happens on the sets of an SLB film.
At this moment, between this one and the Jayalalithaa biopic, if we had to choose, we will go for this one. Say what you want about Alia (and a lot has been said about her in the past few months), the girl can act and so far, she didn’t call anyone a terrorist nor did she try to destroy someone’s reputation. Her biggest mistake so far was to decide to get linked to Ranbir Kapoor because up until then, the attention was on her acting skills and now it’s all about RK this or RK that.
Anyway, Gangubai Kathiawadi looks good! Now, let’s wait for the trailer.