The  7 Performances  That You May Have Missed In 2003 While Watching the Pathans, Jawans and other Animals

1. Abhishek Chauhan In Mast Mein Rehne Ka: Not having seen this young actor’s work at all in the past, I was  completely bowled  over by Chauhan in Vijay Maurya’s charming slice-of-life drama .Chauhan’s  Alice-in-wonderland actor could have  easily toppled  over in the  realm of overstatement(read: hamming). But Chauhan reins  it in. He reminded me of Raj Kapoor in Awara.
2. Sidhant  Gupta  in Jubilee:  What a delightful  ebullient performance this struggler of our times gave  as a  struggler in Filmistan during the turbulent times when the  country  was divided into two. Just like cinema today, divided  between the big screen and the OTT. A warning: don’t underestimate  the power of the underdog.
3. Shahana Goswami in Zwigato: Applause Entertainment and Nandita Das’s seriously underrated  film about a food-delivery boy during Covid, had Shahana Goswami delivering a knockout performance  as  the  supportive resourceful wife of her suddenly-jobless husband.  Is there anything Shahana  can’t do?
4. Amruta Subhash in Lust Stories: Speaking of the power  of the OTT, here was Konkona Sen Sharma’s  half-hour short  story in an uneven anthology where  Amruta Subhash  stood out as a househelp who uses her employer’s posh bedroom  for some  us-time with her  husband.  Oh, the way Amruta stood her ground,  hand on hips, retort on  lips…oof, take  a  bow,lady.
5. Saiyami Kher  in Ghoomer: As a cricketer who  loses a limb in a car accident, Saiyami  not only plays  a seriously disabled cricketer, she  also makes sure that the  audience spares  no sympathy for her character, only admiration. Will  Filmistan  recognize real talent and stop mollycoddling the Ananyas and the other scar-kids?
6. Alaya F In Almost Love With DJ Mohabbat:   Both AlayaF and debutant Karan Mehta  nail their parts, she  more so than he. Alaya in two key sequences  is  a revelation. She  performs  better  in the London episodes where she must play Ayesha a lonely  spoilt rich brat  and  an embarrassingly  clingy love-smitten  creature  to a self-absorbed  musician .In one of the film’s most beautifully conceived  sequences  Ayesha tells the  introverted Harmeet why she cannot help being his  little lamb, why she goes all mushy when she looks at him.It’s  a memorable monologue  brilliantly performed by Alaya . She is most certainly a  better actor than her grandfather Kabir Bedi  and her mother Pooja Bedi.

7.K K Menon  In  Love All:  This small  underated film   has a certain dignity and poise in the  storytelling. A lot of these qualities emerge from Kay Kay Menon’s central performance as Siddharth Sharma,  a former  badminton champ  whose career  was  cut short by politics in sports(yeah yeah, that bane of  all sportsmanship) and now Siddharth won’t let his  son Aaditya(a  fabulously dedicated performance by  Ark Jain) anywhere  near the sportsfield.Siddharth’s transformation from unreasonable dad to  a flexible sporting mentor would  have seemed  abrupt  and manufactured were it not for Kay Kay Menon who makes Siddharth’s transformative travel tenable. From the opening credits when  we see him sitting quietly in a taxi  with his family as they arrive in Bhopal,  Kay Kay’s eyes brim with untold  pain.