Film Review: Sarfira

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal, Radhika Madan, Seema Biswas, R. Sarathkumar, Saurabh Goyal, Krishnakumar Balasubramaniam

Direction: Sudha Kongara

Sitting through 156 minutes of ‘Sarfira’ is as tedious as starting an airline and almost as challenging as hoodwinking a venture capitalist to part with his money for a half-baked idea. Everything here is high voltage. You yearn for silence and you do get as much of it as you would snatch at a busy airport. It is firstly tiring when you have to sit through nearly three hours of a biopic. More so when you are told that the maker has taken fictional liberties.

Inspired by ‘Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey’, the film version in south came to be made as ‘Soorarai Pottru’ which garnered eyeballs aplenty and awards to match. The life story of Air Deccan: involving its founder G.R. Gopinath. Yes the life of a visionary who attempted and succeeded in establishing a low-cost airline and broke the glass ceiling is bound to have its quota of ebbs and flows. So it was with Gopinath.

The challenge, therefore, for film-maker Sudha Kongara was to make the chaff from the grass. Considering that she made the film in Tamil, one would have expected her to iron out the creases. Obviously fortified by the national-level encouragement and recognition, she decides to replicate largely and marginally adapt it in the Marathi milieu replacing its original Tamil backdrop. There lies the first designer porthole in this monsoon release. There are plenty ahead.

The near-three-hour biopic calls for far better scripting. Loud drama, punctuated by poorly crafted stunt skills make for very tedious viewing. Add to this the high-decibel rendition of the performers uniformly and you land up viewing an over-the-top aviation drama. Also, there are two distinctive stances on music in our films: one that they are an intrinsic narrative, in fact a value-add. During the ’60s and the ’70s, it was the mainstay, if not the saving grace. In recent times it is an intuitive super-imposition. Item numbers and all. This time every time the aviation hero croons a romantic number it is completely out of sync. It is more Akshay Kumar than Vir Mhatre the protagonist. The heroine who looks more like what Kangana Ranaut left behind, is far from romantic. That is another jarring aspect of the seemingly endless biopic.

Vir Mhatre (Akshay Kumar) has left the armed forces and has a streak of rebellion in him, which leads to serious misunderstandings with his Gandhian dad. However, grounded from the services, Mhatre becomes a visionary who dreams of starting India’s own low-cost airline. The unmarried Mhatre, much rejected in the matrimonial market, meets up with Rani (Radhika Madan) who wears an attitude on her sleeve and behaves like Kangana. Very theatrical and loud and unconvincing. The trials and tribulations of Mhatre alongside his friend Chaitanya (Krishnakumar Balasubramaniam) and Sam (Saurabh Goyal) with high-flying Paresh Goswami (Paresh Rawal) constitutes the story of the birth and establishment of India’s first low-cost airline. Trite as it may seem, it turns out at a skeleton level that the great challenge in the launch was but a competitor. Love triangle replaced by entrepreneurial triangle. The anguish of a visionary stonewalled by the proverbial bureaucracy and egged on by a villainous competitor despite its loud octaves falls flat.

The cast is far from subdued or subtle. The theatrics are all too obvious and screaming. It is Akshay Kumar who saves the day. It now remains to be seen if the BO saves him. His enthusiasm, it’s just right. His sincerity is never in question. Paresh Rawal hardly has anything to do. Seema Biswas is fiery and adds credibility. However the standout performance is Akshay Kumar. His (dwindling?) fans have enough to rejoice.

How miscued it all is is clear from the fact that a visionary is perceived as a ‘sarfira’.