Biopics are not the defined form of entertainment. Not in the Bombay Talkies
grammar. The film sets out to tell the life of a legendary sportsperson whose
life details are not very well known. After all he was an athlete not a
cricketer and thank you Rakeysh Ompraksah Mehra for that!! Unfortunately for
the viewer and his own good the film maker perhaps thought of a launch in
keeping with Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi but ends with a finish product as
long and endurance testing as Mera Naam Joker.
Early in the film (told in different time, zone and geographical layers), a
character tells a bureaucrat that to explain why Milkha would not go to
Pakistan is a not a short story and would take hours and the official replies:
the journey form Chandigarh to Delhi too is not short. The movie prefers that
kind of jolting steam engine time to unfold and the high fly audience gets
impatient and this is a huge undoing of an otherwise sincere effort.
Milkha (Farhan Akhtar) is a victim of the great Asian divide and survives the
trauma of partition and comes to India with only one other surviving member of
the family his sister (Divya Dutta). Even as young Milkha (Jabtej Singh) grows
up in the toxic world of politics and gets involved in small crimes and is
witness to abuse of his sister, he comes into his own as a sprinter with
extraordinary skill sets and endurance levels. It is clear that he is made for
bigger times and headlines. He finally lands with a job at the EME Centre
Secunderabad and is picked for the athletes meet. Seeing talent and passion in
the guy, his senior (Pawan Malhotra) takes him under his tutelage. The evolution
is detailed and even a tad wandering with the customary love life (Sonam as
Nirmal Kaur in a brief and breezy appearance) .
We then have the milestones: Olympics Melbourne, Asian Games 1956 (Hong Kong).
Common Wealth 1958 (Peeking as it then was) and Olympics 1960 (Rome). The
triumphs, the turmoils, the agony and the ecstasy all wrapped in a life.
The film revisits the nightmare of partition, of being uprooted, about hunger
and starvation, about the yearning for the missing ones. Do not miss the heart
gnawing scene of Divya and young Jabtej Singh at the refugee camp. It is here
that Milkha acquires a feature of being haunted with a command to run. It is a
paradoxical life of a guy who is an athlete and yet haunted by the command to
run!! It is this dramatic irony that requires to be told and is but rather
drearily.
Even given the premise that a film of such proportions requires a different
mind-set and that endurance is a fine salute to the hero, it gets tedious
beyond a point. You need to be too good in the craft to do a film that lasts
all of 187 minutes. Unfortunately while Rakeysh is good he is not that good.
The film also suffers some clichéd outlook that gals in the West are eager to
be bedded, that Pakistan officials are outright rude and this mars the larger
picture. While it was Yahya Khan who first refers to Milkha as the ‘Flying
Sikh’ the interaction between players across borders is always shown with
lingering bitterness.
The film is unhesitatingly viewable for the brilliance of Farhan Akhtar. If the
dude is great behind screen he is magnificent in front. He is nibble footed
(Strangely the film goes on to suggest that Milkha was as great dancer as he
was a sprinter!). As the struggling athlete, the coy lover, the naïve
traveller, the fighter with dignity and a sense of humour he is top of the
rack. In an amazing translation of the emotional highs and lows of a great
sportsman, he is superlative and should surely attract the honest juries when
it is time to distribute the trophies.
If only Baagh Milkha Baagh was a sprint and not a cross country marathon!!
L. Ravichander.