‘He had unique ability to play with his pain’

Charlie Chaplin; (right) Jayeshbhai Jordaar takes on female foeticide

In Jayeshbhai Jordaar, Ranveer Singh, armed with wit and humour, tackles the social evil of female foeticide. The actor plays a mild-mannered Gujarati man who will go to any extent to save his unborn girl child, standing up against his sarpanch father who yearns for a grandson. To Singh, Divyang Thakkar's directorial offering, which makes a strong case for gender equality, is along the lines of Charlie Chaplin's satires. He elaborates, "Jayeshbhai is a character with no reference point in Hindi cinema, but if I had to draw parallels with someone in terms of mannerisms, it would have to be Charlie Chaplin. As an artiste, he had this unique ability to take his pain and play with it. His situation was always deeply tragic, but he was able to deal with it through the power of
humour."

The beauty of the script aside, Singh says that he took on Jayeshbhai Jordaar as it gave him the opportunity to explore his favourite genre - tragic comedy. "Life is Beautiful [1997] is my favourite movie of all time. To take suffering and make light of it is a beautiful way of living."

Chaplin's characters and Jayeshbhai may be decades and continents apart, but Singh understood that they shared the common theme of hidden pathos. As he reported to the set of the Maneesh Sharma production, the actor put up a picture of the legendary actor-filmmaker in his vanity van, using it to channel similar energy for his social comedy. "I saw a close-up picture of Chaplin during my research. On the face of it, it looks like a funny picture, but if you look into his eyes, you will see that they are brimming with tears. That was my driving force for Jayesh. I blew up this picture to four feet by four feet, and pasted it in my vanity van. It gave me every character cue that I needed before going out to become Jayesh."