Reel-ing It In with Vidya Balan, Madhuri Dixit and Others

The Instagram reel is captioned “This Monday was a laung day” and if you press play, you can see Vidya Balan lip-sync to a set of dialogues from the cartoon channel Mania ki Duniya. After enumerating all the products consumed in a day that include laung, or cloves, (toothpaste, dal, chai, biryani, paan), the audio breaks into a snatch from the Wiz Khalifa/Charlie Puth song "See You Again", with the line “It’s been a long day.”

It’s a simple, silly pun that Balan elevates into hilarity with her acting skills and comic timing. Her face responds differently to each successive utterance of laung. The first two evoke surprise, then there’s resignation, and finally alarm at the sheer preponderance of laung. Few films in Balan’s filmography have harnessed her comedic talent well, but the actor’s Instagram account is full of side-aplitting reels in which she flexes her funny bone.

The short-form video — originally popularised by the Chinese-created app TikTok, which was banned in India in 2020 — lends itself very well to short comic sketches and one-liners. Younger actors like Janhvi Kapoor cottoned on to this quality quickly. Kapoor, in between glamorous photoshoots, puts out videos in everyday clothes, lip-syncing with her hair and make-up team to the viral “Pooja, what is this behaviour” exchange, for instance. But the older actors are not far behind, recognising how reels can show their talents in different ways from their films. Balan’s reels are a good example.

So are Madhuri Dixit's. Dixit vibes to various songs in her reels, and she often injects humour into the mix. Sometimes she participates in viral trends (a nod to her being in the loop, despite being in her 50s); at other times, she and her famous friends dance to old classics. The pressure of producing content doesn’t seem to weigh on her. She is genuinely enjoying herself, and for her fans, it’s wonderful to see how effortlessly she can tap into an emotion, perform a hook step or score a laugh.

The freedom and ease to reuse audio tracks is perhaps one of the best things about reels. While this is yet another means of repurposing someone’s music for free, reels can also bring exposure to artists and songs without the need for a commercial, traditional music release. Someone like Dixit can simply pick up a young artist’s song from their reel and give it a wider audience, like she did with singer Ananya Dwivedi’s cover of “Jaane Kahan Mera Jigar”, originally sung by Geeta Dutt and Mohammed Rafi for Mr and Mrs 55 (1955). The original reel on Dwivedi’s page now has about 1.7 million views and Dwivedi reposted Dixit’s video, writing, “The queen herself singing to my voice…it’s like my playback singing dream came true, in a weird way.”

Reels have also allowed actors to poke fun at themselves and wear their celebrity status lightly. Take, for example, Riteish and Genelia Deshmukh, who take the silliest of audio tracks and lip-sync to them. There’s no pretension of prep or rehearsal. All they’ve done is memorise a couple of lines. While Dixit and Balan seem to at least have somebody filming them, the Deshmukhs appear to have done away with even this requirement. In an interview with Film Companion, Riteish admitted to occasionally wondering whether making free video content would adversely affect his films, but ultimately decided that as entertainers, they should make the most of this new opportunity.  

Further, while short-format videos have enabled actors to let their hair down and kick back, they’ve also created a new space for creation. With editing tools for video and audio included within the app, reels have allowed actors to make videos, skits, sketches and bits that display their creativity. As Genelia said in the same interview with Film Companion, making the reels felt like auditioning.

Sameera Reddy is a prime example. The actress hasn’t been in a film in ten years, but, accompanied by her mother-in-law Manjri Varde, she has been producing comic reels on Instagram. She and Varde enact exaggerated situations around the time-honoured saas-bahu repartee, unself-consciously mining the clichés for laughs. The "Messy Mama" and "Sassy Saasu" send up at the ways mothers (and mothers-in-law) are perceived and portrayed. Reddy is particularly adept at laughing at herself and the expectations she comes up against as a 44-year-old woman in entertainment.

As any content creator will tell you, making reels legitimately counts as work, no matter how effortless and casual it might seem. What’s fascinating is to see how for some actors, Instagram reels have become an extension of their other reel work. Perhaps the Instagram reel is the true meshing of real and reel?