Priyanka Chopra, Varanasi and the question of a Telugu debut; was the Ram Charan starrer Thoofan forgotten?

The Varanasi team’s widely circulated interview with Screen Rant features a rather awkward moment. When the interviewer asks Priyanka Chopra about her Telugu debut in Varanasi, the actor says she cannot remember when she last did a Telugu film. Mahesh Babu quickly steps in to add, “This is her first Telugu film.” But that is not entirely accurate. Priyanka Chopra had, in fact, featured in the Telugu version of the Amitabh Bachchan classic Zanjeer in 2013. Titled Thoofan, the Ram Charan starrer had Priyanka playing his love interest in what was admittedly a small role. At the time, Chopra had expressed considerable gratitude to the makers of Thoofan, as opportunities in Bollywood were scarce for her then. A senior member of the Thoofan team views her current statement as a case of selective amnesia. “When we signed her for Thoofan, nobody in the Hindi film industry was willing to sign her. We ourselves felt the role was not substantial enough for a future global star like her. But s...

The director who dared to tell uncomfortable truths: Lindsay Anderson at 100

With films such as O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, the British auteur portrayed his country as a bleak dystopia in decline – what would he make of today’s Britain?

‘No film can be too personal,” declared Lindsay Anderson in the Free Cinema manifesto of 1956. A decade later he lived up to this slogan when he shot his elegy to youth rebellion If…. at his old school, Cheltenham College. Winning the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes film festival, it was the first in a loose trilogy of films that held up a mirror to a contemporary Britain that Anderson considered to be in a state of moral decline.

O Lucky Man! followed in 1973. Malcolm McDowell, who had played the chief rebel in If…., returned as a modern-day Candide who discovers that 1970s society offers very little grounds for his natural optimism. A brilliant score from Alan Price underpins the film’s bleak viewpoint. In the words of the title song: “If you have a friend on whom you think you can rely, you are a lucky man!” Perhaps paradoxically, Anderson had many friends on whom he could rely even if he didn’t think so and I was lucky that some of those friends became my friends, too.

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