I don’t want to sound judgmental or elitist or something, but can writers please stop handing actors dialogues in English when they clearly bring down the performance of the actor?
One of the things that made The Family Man the best Indian web series (for me) was that it chose to stay true to the characters and demography it’s portraying. There are dialogues in Hindi, Tamil, Malyali, Kashmiri (with subtitles, of course) because that’s honest with the material.
It made sense for Made in Heaven to have plenty of English dialogues, because it was true to it’s characters who were majorly upper-class/rich families in Delhi.
Which is why CLACM bothered me so much (apart from it’s 100 times recycled plot line). They forced so many English dialogues for Nitya just to appeal to the younger audience. But those dialogues were distracting af and seemed to take a toll on Divyanka’s performance (DT is not at all a bad actress, she is good and speaks English fluently), because communicating in English and acting in English are two different things. DT’s effort was visible; it strained her dialogue delivery.
Jennifer was much better in Code M, because she was at ease with her dialogues. In any case, Code M wasn’t so much of an ~acting~ experience.
Coming to the latest in line, Inside Edge was terrible in this department. I hated, hated, hated, Vivek Oberoi’s dialogue delivery. Like the series isn’t great, we had seen everything else (my aunts and I) so we had no option, and went for this. Every character is playing a type in the series (only authentic characters were Suri and Prashant, the only good acting was also by them). But Dhawan was especially bad, not just the sketch but the performance as well. I don’t remember Vivek being so bad in Saathiya and Kurbaan (the only movies of his that I have watched properly, I guess). He was so bad, ugh, and I believe it was because of all those dialogues in English.
Please, can we stop pleasing the world, and stay true to our roots, our culture, our demography? Matlab international ya urban audience ke liye bana rahe ho that doesn’t mean that you cater to what you suppose are their likes and dislikes. Writers should write, would comes organically to them.
