Vikrant Massey, Until We Meet Again

It isn’t  clear  as yet why  Vikrant Massey has decided to quit acting just when things are looking up for him  after 12^th Fail and The Sabarmati Report.

 Long before these, Vikrant   was immediately noticed as  Ranveer Singh’s best friend in Vikramaditya  Motwane’s  Lootera. Ever  since then Massey has been struggling to find his  bearings in the  film industry.

He  was   eminently watchable in the webseries Criminal  Justice and Broken  But Beautiful.Sadly films like Chhapaak and Haseen Dilruba seem to cast  him as  this millennium’s  Vinod Mehra, that dependable actor  who was typecast as the supportive co-star in women-oriented  films   in the 1980s.

Vikrant Massey awaited that one big explosion in his career.Konkona Sen Sharma’s  directorial debut A Death In The Gunj did justice  to  Vikrant Massey’s  talent . But  no one saw that  film outside film festivals.In A Death  In The  Gunj Vikrant Massey set a new benchmark in performing the inconspicuous common man’s extraordinary struggles to remain visible to a world that takes his presence for granted.

  In Karan Rawal’s  Short Film  Half Full  Vikrant  played well against  Naseer .Even though their interaction   lasted for only twelve  minutes, what  the two actors  succeed  in conveying about the value of life is timeless. There is a quality  of comforting  familiarity  in  the way  these  two actors  convey profound thoughts on mortality through  a  seemingly  ordinary conversation.

Vikrant’s best  performance  was  not in 12th Fail but Applause  Entertainment’s  Criminal  Justice  in 2019. Vikrant slipped  into  Riz Ahmed’s role,played by Ben Whishaw  in  the original  BBC series. Both  actors were extraordinary  in portraying the traumatized  murder accused who  is actually a victim. But Vikrant had an edge  as far as  projecting vulnerability is concerned.

  Right from the start when his interest in his  hyper-strung passenger  aggravates  into  passionate sex , to his arrest and his nightmarish experiences in jail(where he  is  nearly raped), Massey  strips  himself  naked emotionally and physically,  to  play a man who never dreamt who  would be in jail.

 In a past interview Vikrant told this writer, “I’ve hardly ever played urban characters. I am proud to have played so many non-urban characters because I feel the heart of real India beats in the non-urban areas. If I have captured the heartbeat of the heartland in my performances I’ve succeeded in doing what I set out to do.”