This Day That Year: Subhash K  Jha Celebrates 28 Years Of Sridevi’s Finest Performance

This Day That Year: Subhash K  Jha  Celebrates 28 Years Of Sridevi’s Finest Performance

   In Sridevi’s oeuvre, Judaai is not regarded as one of her great performances. It’s a  below-average film lifted to likeability by the central performance.I regard Sridevi in Judaai to be superior to her lauded performances in Chandni, Sadma, Lamhe and Mr India.

The truth is she is earth-shatteringly good as a screechy, overbearing housewife who loses her husband to greed.

 Speaking of Sri in slush, Judaai,directed  by the late  Raj Kanwar(nice  guy) and produced by  Sri’s darling husband Boney,  is  a textbook on politically  incorrect  filmmaking, with  Sri playing a human banshee screaming and swearing at her workinclass husband Anil Kapoor until he marries  the moneyed  Urmila Matondkar. Her last hurrah before she bowed out to play wife and mother. “Judaai” is a crass melodrama directed by the late Raj Kanwar. It features Sridevi at her absolute best. The way she lifts the most mundane of scenes has to be seen to be believed.

There is  a sequence where  the repentant wife goes back to her old  home when things  normal…Sri’s expressions of  regret and  remorse blow the screen apart.

 The  power of Sridevi was the power  of  a performing tornado. She took over the screen and  led  audiences into  a world of wondrous emotions, all duly processed for  ingestion. I remember her in Laadla (again directed by Raj Kanwar and co-starring Anil Kapoor) where she played a rich spoilt magnate  of  a company. The way  Sri dominated the screen she  actually made Kapoor look like her minion.

Judaai is  a god-awful concoction about a woman who sells her husband to a female heart-broker. But watta performance. In her last blast before marriage Sridevi exploded into a thousand tiny particles, each signifying  the triumph of spontaneous talent. From a middleclass woman to a vulgar nouveau riche to the woman  who loses everything to her greed, Sridevi’s performance particularly in the second half when she wants her old rookhi-sookhi life back, is mindblowing. Viva  la Devi!

Sridevi’s  last hurrah before she bowed out to play wife and mother. Judaai is a crass melodrama directed by the late Raj Kanwar. It features Sridevi at her absolute best. The ease and fluency  she lifts the most mundane of scenes has to be seen to be believed.

Let me make a candid confession. I’ve always been more of a Sri  fan  than a Mads [Madhuri Dixit] man. At the peak of their respective careers when they were pitched against each other, Sridevi always had an edge.

She was what I’d call a complete star-actress who left us with the most stunning hurrah in Judaai in 1997. A terrible film that I’ve watched countless times to see her play the money-minded harridan who ‘sells’ her husband to Urmila Matondkar. Who but Sridevi could carry of such an outrageous role with such enthusiastic élan?!”

 She once told me  how difficult it was to do  Judaai. “I had to play this really greedy woman who is willing to sell off her husband . She is a terrible person and I had to make her likeable. I would say Judaai was one  of my toughest roles. I had to somehow  make my character Kajal not look like  a  vamp. She was  so  moneyminded that she is too blind to see she is  destroying her marriage.This woman was completely alien to  my nature.”

The  film’s highpoint was the sequence where the  now-repentant woman revisits her past in the  humble  home she once shared with her  husband and  children. This revisitation of  a lost paradise  is  so special because Sridevi made  it special. No other actress in the world could do what she could.

I remember sitting with Yash Chopra just after  the release of Judaai.

Yashji picked  up the phone and dialed Sridevi at the Breach Candy  where the Diva had just delivered Janhvi.

“Sri, listen  after Judaai,you can’t just be a wife and a mother. You have to continue acting. I already have a script ready for you,” Yashji said.

I  have  no clue about Sridevi’s response.

But Judaai remains  a supreme Sridevi  vehicle to this day. The  movie has dated. Sri hasn’t.