Bhag Milkha Bhag Review

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.