Putting the 'act' in action

When we think of master-classes in film acting, we usually envision performers firing sharply written lines at each other in intense dramatic confrontations. Or scenes that have little dialogue but where the silences are soaked in meaning; where each pause, each glance, is somehow significant; where it’s all about understatement. For a good sense of what is commonly thought of as a performance highlight, look at the short clips chosen when acting nominations are read out at the Oscars.

One thing that is usually not associated with acting chops is the high-voltage action sequence. Fight scenes, for instance, are often just fillers or tempo-raisers (and in many of them, stuntmen substitute for the actors anyway). But every once in a while, an action scene does afford opportunities for fine performances as well as for character development within a narrative.

Recently I watched the Extras on a DVD of Anurag Kashyap’s masterful Black Friday, about the investigation that followed the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Among the film’s highlights is a superbly shot sequence where a group of cops pursues a suspect, Imtiaz Ghavate, through a slum area. “Anurag told me he wanted a performance from me in this chase scene,” says the actor, Pranay Narayan — who plays Ghavate — in a documentary, and a performance it certainly is. Over the course of this long scene, Imtiaz goes from being a menacing bhai figure (the first time we see him, he is shot from a low camera angle, looming above us) to a man so hunted and bullied that it’s almost possible to feel sorry for him.

The scene begins on a purposefully energetic note, as you’d expect, but gradually becomes something of a comic routine, as both policemen and quarry move in circles and get worn out. One hysterically funny shot has an unfit cop calling out “Imtiaz, ruk ja” as both men pant breathlessly; by this point, they are lurching rather than running, and the effect is that of two quarrelling lovers trying half-heartedly to make up. It’s a fine depiction of the banality of police-work, humanising cop and criminal — a remarkable achievement in the context of a true story about terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. And the performances help make it compulsively believable.

Good acting is even rarer in full-blooded fight sequences, but one of the best examples I can think of is the Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai in the 1966 film Sword of Doom. Nakadai plays a sadistic swordsman named Ryunosuke who spends much of the story killing and plundering. At the end, as he sits alone in a geisha-house, he is visited by the ghosts of his victims as well as by real people who want him dead; turning completely psychotic, he slashes wildly at these phantoms over the course of an extraordinary, bloody 10-minute sequence.

Jaw-dropping in its length and persistence, this scene is the perfect apocalyptic finish to a story about a cruel and violent man facing his demons. It’s almost Shakespearean in its suggestion of the past haunting the present, and Nakadai is outstanding in the way he seems to be simultaneously a sentient person and a zombie. At times his movements become so mechanical, one gets the impression that his arm is being driven by his “evil” sword; his eyes are hollow and lifeless; he flails unthinkingly at the air; but then he briefly comes alive again and seems conscious of what is happening to him.

Neither of these scenes would qualify for those glib Oscar acting clips, but the performances in them are absolutely integral to the films’ effectiveness. They are reminders that some action scenes require a little more from a performer than a grunted, expressionless “I’ll be back.”

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer