DUPLICATE (1998)

Having made an impressive start in his acting career by winning a number of awards for Best Actor and Best Villain in the early 1990s, Shahrukh continued on this course of portraying distinctive characters, playing the exceptionally mean villain Manu, in Duplicate.  But this was only half his role!  Duplicate stands out as Shahrukh’s first real dual role in which he plays two very different, even totally opposite characters, both of them so convincing that the viewer could easily believe that they are indeed two separate individuals.

Although Duplicate was only an average hit movie, it still stands as a very good comedy, and as such, possibly a milestone in Shahrukh’s acting career as he successfully meets another challenging role in Manu’s look-alike opposite, Bablu.  And as Bablu, Shahrukh finds new and entertaining expressions to represent this innocent, boyish, talkative, playful and clumsy chef who is mistaken for the wanted criminal, Manu. 

Even as the villain, Shahrukh exaggerates Manu’s badness to an almost comical degree, thereby managing to make this exceptionally nasty character entertaining and fun to watch.  Playing these two opposite extremes gives Shahrukh ample opportunity to use and develop an impressive range of gestures and expressions, from body language, facial expressions and even vocal pitch; Manu having the deeper, rough and forceful voice, while Bablu babbles in a nervous higher pitch.

While Manu has a motley gang of odd, ugly and funny-looking crime partners, Bablu’s character is also perfectly complemented by his beloved and doting mother whom he calls Bebe, and when Manu and Bablu change places there are even more hilarious moments between all these characters.  Even Bablu trying to impersonate Manu makes for many good laughs, as well as challenging Shahrukh’s comedy acting skills even further.

More impressive than the great comedy, however, are the scenes of both Manu and Bablu together, even touching and interacting closely with each other, and with no visible sign of film trickery, the viewer is once more easily enticed into believing that Manu and Bablu are really two different people.

Shahrukh successfully continues portraying these two identities even through a very entertaining song in which Manu and Bablu pursue each other’s girlfriends.  As the innocent Bablu’s love interest, Juhi Chawla once again fills the role perfectly, and both she and Shahrukh feature in two songs filmed in beautiful locations in Switzerland. 

In fact, Duplicate features a very impressive musical line-up, with famous names like Anu Malik composing and Javed Akhtar writing songs, as he did for some of Shahrukh’s subsequent successful films such as Veer-Zaara (2004), Main Hoon Na (2204),  Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), and Don (2006). And not in the least, choreography by the multi-award winning Farah Khan who even earned a Broadway Tony Award in 2004 for Best Choreographer. 

Farah Khan’s choreography direction stands out in all of Duplicate’s songs, and especially entertaining is Wah Ji Wah, in which Bablu shows off some impressive moves and antics with food in a big kitchen, and in the following song set in a night club with some exotic costumes and dance moves, including Shahrukh in disguise as Manu.

In fact, the entire movie is extremely well choreographed, not just in song and dance scenes.  Comical action often requires even more accurate planning and execution to make the events appear accidental and thereby amusing, and these clever scenes which demand skillful athletic feats highlight yet another aspect of Shahrukh’s abilities.
 
With such good all-round choreography and music, some scenes in beautiful locations such as Mauritius, and an exceptionally outstanding dual-role effort by Shahrukh, Duplicate is overall immensely entertaining, and it must surely amaze the audience to see two opposite extremes of Shahrukh’s character acting skills in the one movie.

by Barbara Burkowsky

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