The cinema of “strangers connecting on a call/walk” is a trope as old as time. It’s almost a rite of passage for independent film-makers with lower budgets. The narrative is inherently actor-driven. The context of this connection is what distinguishes a story that has something to say from a film that tries to flaunt its intellect. Writer-director Aditya Kripalani seems to have an affinity for this genre. His previous film, Not Today, revolved around the first day of a female suicide-prevention counsellor who gets on a long and vulnerable phone call with a suicidal man to stop him from jumping off a terrace. The one-line premise eventually became a medium to stage a clunky and meandering conversation — the kind that’s derived from thinking and appropriating life rather than experiencing and feeling some truth.
Main Actor Nahin Hoon is a spiritual sequel of sorts. It exists more as a film-school-coded concept than a full-bodied feature about two unlikely souls divided by place and united by time; again, one of them is Muslim (though here the identity doesn’t call out for attention). But the context is more performative: A 35-year-old struggling actor in Mumbai, Mouni, connects with a 55-year-old former banker in Frankfurt, Adnan Baig, through an online audition. What follows is a cross-continent training exercise that turns into a day-long exchange of fragilities, emotional upheavals, insecurities and unresolved trauma. The craft of acting doubles up as a vehicle to unpack all sorts of nakedness. The conflict is that the broken actor forces the broken non-actor into uncomfortable spaces and tasks until he can’t handle it anymore.
At best, the characterisations are interesting. Mouni is a bitter and withered cynic who resents her peers for “selling out” while she remains a stubborn purist who can barely make the rent with side-hustles. The toll of being in it for the love of the game is evident; she’s whiny, eccentric and plain unlikable. For anyone who lives in and around Versova, or works in the film and entertainment field in Mumbai, it’s easy to bump into a version of Mouni — regardless of gender — at a house party, a screening or an audition studio. She looks down on TV actors, scoffs at Bollywood stars, and remains in pursuit of the ‘raw’ potential that an award-winning short film had promised her years ago.
In her head, she’s too good to be mediocre; a Shakespeare fanatic, she’s one breath away from reviewing this film with a header like: “All the world’s a cage”. Chitrangada Satarupa blurs the lines effectively enough, internalising a person that’s both easy and difficult to empathise with. Adnan on the other hand is depressed after decades of banking, and he holds onto Mouni and this audition like a life-raft, blindly trusting her to ‘rescue’ him from drifting like a log of wood.
The problem is the artifice of their bond. If not for the circumstances, their chat might have resembled a hostage situation or a long-distance sex-game gone wrong. Thankfully, the film steers clear from romantic chemistry, but settles on something worse: no chemistry. Adnan suddenly deciding to give an audition in Frankfurt during a walk with his daughter is more of an exposition dump than an instinctive choice. It’s also not really clear why someone like Mouni entertains Adnan for so long. Adnan is an uncomfortable actor, but it often feels as though Nawazuddin Siddiqui is just as uncomfortable as Adnan; the sincerity of the character is stilted because the film itself is pretending to be deeper than it is. They hang up on each other a bunch of times, but always call back because how else will we notice their cultural contrasts and the jarring difference in ambient sounds across environments?
The gimmick is that the film has reportedly been shot live across both locations. Mouni and Adnan are on real-time calls, filmed simultaneously by different crews. It helps in terms of actual reactions to curated behavior, but the film refuses to be more visually expressive. I get that the cuts between both characters and palettes are the whole point; she is chaos, he is calm. But the constant back and forth — the camera stubbornly revealing a face only when they speak — gets jarring for a runtime of two hours. Perhaps the edit could have examined more than just the text. Recreating the track of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (last used in the climax of Merry Christmas) is a crutch here; it tries to convey the intensity of Adnan’s journey because the writing and performance fail to. The transformation remains on paper, and it doesn’t register on the screen. It’s like developing a character and living with him for so long that the execution is nearly forgotten.
Most of all, Main Actor Nahin Hoon (I Am Not An Actor) has no business being so dull and distant. The sight of two strangers engaging with each other and going through a life-altering day together feels a bit too designed. One can tell that the makers are familiar with Mouni’s ecosystem, and it’s nice that there’s a veiled critique of the Resilient Idealist that so many movies tend to romanticise. Mouni is called out for reverse-engineering her personality to cushion her failures. But the film, like many of its predecessors, strives to advertise its uncompromising tone instead of being curious about the central relationship. It’s consumed by its own parade of awkward words and written confessions and borrowed silences. Most of it is happening because the camera is on them, not because two survivors find themselves drawn to each other during a crisis. Who can resist the irony of a movie called Main Actor Nahin Hoon itself being the biggest actor of the lot?