Back in school, the loudest arguments in my circles weren’t about politics or football but about cinema. And always, it came down to the same split: Mammootty or Mohanlal?
My friends had their camps, their proofs, their punchlines. But for the longest, I simply listened wondering: Why is it that I had never thought of Mohanlal as an “actor” at all till then? With Mammootty, you marvelled at the performance. With Mohanlal, you forgot a performance was even happening.
Mohanlal rarely signals a transformation with makeup, costume, or exaggerated gestures. A glance, a shift in posture, a flicker in expression, and he conveys despair, mischief, or quiet menace. This subtlety is what makes his craft feel effortless, yet it is the product of a lifetime of meticulous observation, instinct, and an uncanny sense of human behaviour. And it is this mastery over his craft that has won him the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
Mani Ratnam’s 1997 political epic Iruvar is perhaps the finest showcase of Mohanlal’s craft outside Malayalam cinema. Mohanlal, in the film, inhabits Anandan, an onscreen adaptation of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M G Ramachandran. Opposite him is Prakash Raj, portraying a version of M Karunanidhi, the Dravidian counterweight that always challenged MGR’s regalia.
Anandan doesn’t age behind prosthetics or masks. His face, for the most part, remains unaltered. The same clean-shaven visage, a shift in costume and a greying of hair. And yet, through sheer presence, he charts the journey of Anandan from a nameless extra to a weary statesman. The proof lies in the body, in the way it bends, hesitates, captures the situation, or holds its ground.
Take an early moment, when the role of a king slips from his grasp and he is shoved back into the uniform of a constable.
Anandan’s body shrinks as though lowered into the earth. The shoulders sag, the spine bends slightly, and the costume change there, for the audience, feels like a burial.
His face shows us how cruelly the scratchy fabric of a constable’s uniform rubs against his skin. Mohanlal lets Anandan’s shoulders cave in, his back no longer claiming space but retreating from it. He clutches at the fake beard, presses it against his face, and wipes his tears with it. An act at once absurd and heartbreaking.
In that gesture, the grandeur of performance collapses into the small, private pain of humiliation. It is as though he is erasing the memory of the king he could have been, smothering the dream with the very prop meant to disguise him.
The next turn of fate plays out in Mohanlal’s silence. Anandan introduces his friend Tamizhselvan (played by Prakash Raj) to a skeptical producer, staking his own future on another man’s words. Once he is introduced, Anandan has no lines here, or no action to anchor him. And the actor there turns to the smallest of tools: The glance, the breath, the pause, the smile.
The eyes flicker between the speakers, hope and fear tugging at each corner of his face. A half-smile emerges, dies, emerges again. The jaw tightens, then softens with a nod. And when Tamizhselvan triumphs, Anandan does not leap into joy. He simply lifts. A subtle straightening, as though invisible chains have fallen away. The face breaks into light. The body exhales. A man has been remade, and the audience has lived the remaking.
The unknown extra is on his way to be a hero, and Anandan takes it upon him to make sure that he never fails again. This transformation, which is yet to come in the movie, is signalled through micro gestures.
Years pass, the story hardens, and Anandan ascends. By now he is the Chief Minister, a master of crowds, a tactician who understands the theatre of politics. Mohanlal plays him not with painted wrinkles or a mask of age, but with time itself etched into posture.
The gait slows, the gestures become economical, the smile, earlier natural and joyful, turns deliberate and careful. Each movement is measured, as though his body has absorbed the weight of office. Yet beneath the armour of authority lies the pulse of memory, waiting to escape. And it does, in one devastating encounter.
Anandan sits beside Tamizhselvan, his old friend-turned-rival. To the crowd, he is the consummate politician, every gesture rehearsed. But in the briefest glance at the man beside him, the mask fractures. For a second, he is not the Chief Minister. He is the young man who once dreamed, laughed, fought, and lost. He meets not his rival, but the young orator who taught him how to dream big, and the one who tried to clip his wings when he ascended greater heights.
The smile he gives carries three lives at once: One for the voters who cheer him, one for the friend he still mourns, and one the rival whom he’s all set to fight in upcoming elections. It is layered but quietly shattering. Mohanlal lets all truths coexist, never choosing one over the other.
There is, in Mohanlal’s Anandan, no trace of an actor reaching for histrionics. In Mohanlal, there is no distance between the ordinary and the monumental. He can shrink into a corner like a child lost in the dark, and in the next breath expand to fill a hall with the ease of a monarch. That elasticity is his genius.
Actors perform. Mohanlal disappears. What remains is the illusion of life itself, so delicate and persuasive that one forgets the craft until it is already memory.
akhil.pj@expressindia.com
