The Ash effect

Poor Aishwarya Rai. Not only does she have rather unfortunate taste in men, she also has to be camera-worthy at all times. This morning’s Times of India has caught her behind very tastefully, clad all in black and covered with a tied-on jacket. Baseball cap on, sunglasses covering a lot of her much-vaunted face, she looks startlingly out of place in small town Karnataka, leaving the shoot of Guru, co-starring her reportedly-recent-but-now-over love, Abhishek Bachchan. After a stint with a physical trainer, her figure is better than ever and her face…ah, can you improve on perfection?

She hasn’t always been so lucky with the public image, however. Remember her appearance at a film awards celebration, when she sported a bruised eye, carefully but not completely camouflaged by make-up and enormous grasshopper shades? And her rather battered mien some months later at a children’s home with a new beau, Vivek (that was before the man went numerological) Oberoi? After that, the battering has not been physical, and Ash has not been within reach for the relentless Indian media to examine every pore of her face and life’s effects on it. So while reports of her shooting (literally) star-ish progress through Indo-West films, fuelled in part by her charm and beauty, continue to waft in via the newswires, most of the coverage has been fairly neutral, innocuous for the most part.

Today the press is indulging in Ash-bashing once again. Mistress of Spices, her film with Paul Mayeda Berges, co-starring the dishier-than-Martin-Henderson Dylan McDermott, has fallen flat on its more-than-bland face, in the UK and India. Reviews are nasty, bad enough for the former Miss World to hide her face again, this time in shame and embarrassment at the universal responses to her acting…or lack of it. Is she that bad an actor? Perhaps not. If a director like Sanjay Leela Bhansali could make her almost thespian in films like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas, why couldn’t Mr Berges manage to do the same in his debut production? Or did the hype overtake the performances?

Maybe Ash is just not ready for the big time. She did it with her looks, nabbing crowns and modelling campaigns with fabulous eclat. She seemed to be following her own example with cinema, too. Her face may have been her fortune. But can she act?