Heer toh badi happy hai: Maanvi Gagroo has returned, and here's how it happened

Heer Sara

This Friday, actor Maanvi Gagroo returned to the theatres after six years. That gap was driven by a lack of compelling scripts. So, we assumed her latest release, Heer Sara, must have ticked all the boxes for her to have boarded the Patralekha-starrer. "When Kartik [Chaudhry, director] and Manuj [Sharma, co-writer] told me, ‘We have this story about two girls on a road trip and they go on a bike trip from Indore to Puducherry,' I got excited," she says.

Impressed with the script, Gagroo dived into the prep for the film, and was pleasantly surprised by the collaborative nature of her director and writer. "The more I was working on it, the more it was becoming like a collaborative project. Suddenly, it felt like I was involved in the characterisation. I would discuss with them how Indoris talk - their Hindi is different from how it's spoken in Mumbai. So, I thought about how I could bring that to the character," she says.

Heer Sara stood out among the films being offered to the actor at the time. We wonder if she spotted a pattern in the scripts that she rejected. "Amateur dialogues, token female protagonists, and shallow characterisation," she cites. "Just because you have a woman at the centre of a story, doesn't make it a feminist one. And it's not like I only do feminist stuff. I'm open to doing anything. We can only tell stories and let people take whatever lessons they take from it," she shares.

The new film, Heer Sara, is about two girls on a bike trip from Indore to Puducherry

Another recurring character that came her way was of an influencer. Gagroo says, "It's okay to show an influencer, but then you have make it authentic, right? For that you have to research how influencers talk, what their life is like, and what their struggles are. Not to say that all influencers are the same, but some certain struggles will be universal, right? I just felt there was no depth in a lot of the scripts that I was getting. For the lack of a better word, it felt like ChatGPT-ed. It's okay to use it as a tool, but where is the creativity?"

Feminist stories continue to be exceptions in Hindi cinema. Ones that have intent blended with powerful storytelling are even rarer. How difficult is it to be a feminist in the Hindi film industry, we ask. "Oh boy! How much time do you have?" she laughs. "It's hard. But it's also easy. The industry is a microcosm of the society at large. So, there are people who understand feminism, and work on feminist principles. They will treat men and women the same. But there are people who don't and think, ‘Hero toh hero hota hai'. So you just navigate it, and whenever you can draw lines, you do it," she says.

She's also observed tokenism in the industry. "I don't like being discriminated against because of my gender. I don't like it if I'm in a situation where I'm not being heard, or my opinion is not being paid attention to. A lot of times they have a singular woman in a room full of men, just as a token service. They say, ‘Ours is a diverse room', but it's not," she says.
It might take the industry some time to lighten the burden that feminist artistes carry every day, but there's something that Gagroo finds hope in. "The phase that we are in, there are a lot of women in the crew, which was not something we had earlier," she says.

Seeing women as assistant directors, in different departments of filmmaking, heading several of them, on the biggest of projects, is a change that the actor wants to highlight. "That is one way of helping the cause of feminism, because the minute men start interacting with women in the workspace, automatically they start treating them like people," she says.

The conversation moves towards the importance of the female gaze, especially while shooting intimacy. Gagroo, who shot one such scene in Heer Sara and a few in Four More Shots Please! (2019-25), says that most male directors focus on the female body to highlight intimacy. "Nowadays, you can tell just by watching an intimate scene whether the director is a man or a woman. The female gaze will always focus on emotional intimacy. And you don't need to be naked for emotional intimacy because it's about the lighting, the chemistry," she says.

But the actor makes a point to heap praise at her Heer Sara director for displaying sensitivity while filming the intimate scene. What especially touched Gagroo was that Chaudhry didn't need her to explain her reservations or requirements for the scene. "There's one scene where my character and Nishank's [Verma] character make out in a trial room. The team was so sensitive to the fact that actors are also people at the end of the day. It's one thing if I ask for certain things and they do it, but when it comes from them, I find it very heartwarming. And now, of course, we have intimacy coordinators. So, that makes it a lot better for actors," she signs off.