In Smile (2005), a smaller but heartwarming film by Jeffrey Kramer, an American high school student Katie signs up for a trip to China, where she meets Lin, a girl with a facial deformity. Lin almost doesn't show her face in the film, but both the girls form a friendship that changes both their lives. American director Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky (2001), a remake of the Spanish film Open Your Eyes (1997), is an entertaining, and in some parts, absurdly superficial thriller in which the lead role of a womanising publishing magnate played by Tom Cruise emerges from a near-fatal car crash with a disfigured face. Then, through a miracle of cosmetic surgery, his supreme good looks, which Cruise usually gloats in, are restored. But thankfully, some existential questions continue to haunt him, which attempt to be the film's thriller element as well as soul.
Facial disfigurement, as opposed to disability, isn't easy to portray on screen because it is simply difficult to get past the immediate horror of seeing it. There are several examples of film directors who have portrayed disability with powerfully realistic details, such as Shonali Bose's Margarita with a Straw (2014) and recently, the moorings of a blind man's heart in Sriram Raghavan's Andhadhun (2018). The badly overacted examples far outnumber the good ones. But we have never seen disfigurement in Hindi cinema.
Having talked to many of them in the past 15 years, throughout my career as a journalist, I have sensed that more than all the support they need, medically and financially, what they wish for is a sense of normalcy—to work, to laugh, to be part of communities, to have friends and to have coffee at the neighbourhood café. Padukone and Gulzar, and of course the writers of the film, have a remarkable opportunity to articulate this desire, to go beyond the proclivity of all biopic makers in Bollywood to make monotone hero stories that rest entirely on adversity and climactic triumph.
