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`Promos are misleading'
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With Mahesh Bhatt's "Zeher", Udita Goswami casts off the shadow of "Paap". RANA SIDDIQUI speaks to the model-turned-actress.
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Udita Goswami... posing for the right image.
IT IS a complete role reversal - from a young, religious girl in Pooja Bhatt's Paap, who suppresses her worldly desires to become a monk, to a married woman accessible to a man other than her husband in Bhatt's Zeher releasing this Friday. For the model-turned actress Udita Goswami, it is a conscious effort to change her image.
"My first film (Paap) labelled me as a sidhi-sadhi girl, which needed to be changed, though in my personal life, I am very simple. I don't go to parties, don't socialise, don't hire a public relation office to promote me. So, there is no way people can know me and see the changes in my appearance. Take for example, people saw me in short hair and dark skin in Paap. Now they don't know that I have grown my hair, put on some weight and looking different. But I want to be seen. This film is just a medium for that," she says.
This is also a medium to promote skin shows, a trend now increasingly used with a variety of veiled excuses only to pull cinemagoers to theatre halls. And if promos are an indicator to go by, then Udita surely would experience sweet success with Zeher. After all, she gets to go beyond just an ephemeral swimsuit number. But is this the only way to get noticed?
"That's what I want to tell you. The film is not about explicit intimate scenes as the promos are showing. I request people not to go by the promos. They are misleading. Just as it was in Paap. It fell flat because some people went to watch the film only because of those titillating promos and came back disappointed. And those who prefer to watch a neat and clean film did not go to watch Paap, again because of the promos. And the rest who went, I believe were not the ones who like watching aesthetically beautiful film. This time I have requested the producer not to promote the film with those ambiguous advertisements. I am really apprehensive about the fate of the film now," she says.
Ironically, she adds even having a "problem working in a film of this kind." Moreover, she had "major date problems" as she was shooting for Amar Joshi Shaheed Ho Gaya. "But Pooja (Bhatt) was insistent, saying it has a nice story," says Udita, in New Delhi this past week for the promotion of Zeher.
Girl next door
As you continue conversing with her, Udita actually comes across as a girl next-door, quite accessible, and one who beams with pride when you compliment her. "For career reasons, I had to shift my base to Mumbai. I miss Delhi, my modelling days, my friends, my driver, the big home and four dogs. Mumbai houses are so small. With such surroundings, I feel incomplete," adds the soft beauty from Dehra Dun, who spent all her modelling days here.
Yet, Udita says, she is gearing up to meet challenges. Challenges to prove herself as a good actress with no handicap of language and the required body language in films. "In Zeher, I was delivering my dialogue casually. Mahesh Bhatt sahab (producer) and Mohit Suri (director) told me, `you are playing a married woman who is bashed up by her uncaring husband. You have to look and behave like an intense woman in pain.' So I changed my gestures, added pauses in my dialogues and spoke like a matured woman," she relates. "In Veer Zaara," she continues, "a friend of mine rightly observed that no character spoke in proper Urdu despite its Muslim backdrop and pre-partition days. It shows how much actors are noticed by cinemagoers." Similarly during the shooting of Amar Joshi... , when she saw her co-stars Arshad Warsi, Rajpal Yadav, Suniel Shetty delivering dialogues with "perfect timing," she felt "nervous."
Talking about film offers, she counts on Kisse Pyar Karoon and one more untitled film as part of her kitty. "Kisse Pyar Karoon is a David Dhawan-kind-of-film by Ajay Chandok. People are saying that working in this film for me is like coming down from a convent school (Mahesh Bhatt camp) to a municipal one," she laughs.
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