​While Priyanka Gets A  Brief Hollywood Break, ​Our Own Ali Fazal Slays It With Judi Dench

​Priyanka Chopra‘s  role in Baywatch is even briefer than her beachwear in the film. Before her it was Deepika Padukone whose role and performance disappointed  in The Fast & The Furious.

While Year after year Bollywood stars get a raw deal in international cinema, Ali Fazal promises to be the first Indian actor to get top billing and equal prominence with a global legend.​

It is almost impossible to  project a relationship of equals when two actors are meant to be representing a culturally socially and economically imbalanced relationship.And when those two actors are the formidable Judi Dench and the  relatively raw and inexperienced Ali Fazal, the chasm between the Have and Have-not become even more non-negotiable.

But Ali Fazal, God bless his unfettered unselfconscious spirit, manages to make the relationship between Queen Victoria and her favourite Man-Friday Abdul in this Colonial cross-cultural non-romance , look absolutely convincing.

It is in the way Fazal looks at Ms Dench….his eyes soaked in a vinegary  warmth that has nothing to do with lust for power or, God forbid, sex. It’s the look of a guileless  but mature boy-man who adores someone far above him in rank, wisdom and age.

It’s that LOOK  which holds us in the trailer of Victoria & Abdul. Director Stephen Frears  opens up the windows and the doors of the two hearts that somehow came together in the unlikeliest of friendship.

The presentation is posh but not overblown. The humour is British but not over-dry. The warmth of the central relationship is tangible  but not cloying.

While the two central characters grip our senses in the trailer , the incidental characters also seem to have been carved out of the wood of the plausible. The Queen’s  court throbs with a lived-in familiarity. Judi Dench snoring off at the dinner table ,her deputies declaring her insane for befriending an  Indian ‘peasant’, the Queen stubbornly  insisting that her new young handsome Indian Man-Friday-turned-friend teach her Urdu and the tenets of the Holy Quran…it all adds up to a feeling of being in the midst of a  relationship that transcends convention and definition.

And every time Ali Fazal  looks at Ms Dench with that heart-melting smile I am reminded of Gulzar Saab’s lines Humne dekhi hai unnaankhon  ki mehekti khusbhoo haath se chuke isse rishton ka ilzaamna do.

Ali Fazal, get ready to be the next Shashi Kapoor  in the West.