Aug 12, 2007 07:05 PM
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(Updated Dec 25, 2008 09:43 AM)
How do you create magic on Indian celluloid screen without the usual elements of glamour – heroin, dance around trees, and foreign locales without any reason, mushy love? How can you grow a King even more? And most importantly how do create a movie on around the sport that has always been the second fiddle for the majority of cine goers of today?
Watch Chak De for all of above and more.
Only SRK could have done the justice to modern day Hockey Coach Kabir Khan. How many heroes have picked roles where they start as loser, do not have any heroine, no songs to mouth and not even a punch to throw at the baddies.
For once the usual glamour elements are missing in this must see movie. The prettiest babe is one of women hockey player “Preeti Sabharwal” and she gets nowhere close to SRK in a romantic situation. The women who has most interaction with SRK is “Krishna jee”, an absolute antithesis of usual glamour. Add to it 15 more women of various shapes & sizes. And they look like a typical team.
The only thing that takes this movie over and above the usual elements and still makes it worth the watch is the underlying basic desire of viewers to watch the “underdogs win”. Hasn’t that been the successful formula of most of the Indian films for ages? So here you have an underdog of a sport, an underdog team and an underdog of a coach. Of course if they win, audience is bound to feel good & clap and a majority of us go to cinema just for that. I would include multiplex audience; as well .It is this underdog formula that is the single unifying theme that binds the movie together - The Soul of Chak De.
The tight script of the movie ensures that viewer interest is kept alive thru out the movie. All underdogs win at the end of the day but the grueling, un-glamorous journey without the aid of any popular number are the hallmark of this movie. There is not even a single song that has been sung on the screen by actors. All the songs are in background, again no easy feat to achieve. The pace of movie is just right although one does feel that another 10 mins of movie would have helped to set lot of contexts right and would have helped flush out character details even better.
As you watch movie you can’t help but be part of that positive feeling that keeps rising as the movie progresses. The movie also captures the harsh realities that the sport and the common man in India face day in day out. Lack of sponsors for hockey, unfair advantage that Cricket enjoys, dilemma faced by married sports women, inability of fathers to let go of their daughters for sports, the fact that hockey is not a paying sport – Kabir Khan has a scooter in all the seven years whereas a Cricket player drives in a swanky SUV and how the sports is still surviving despite the indifferent federations & associations. So a lot had to be communicated in the film which had to be entertaining as well. So get a versatile actor and a tight script add to it great camera work and you have a winner at hand.
Director has used SRKs nervous energy to hilt .The way coach Kabir Khan goes week on knees when his team wins final shows his vulnerability unseen till then. As expected that last pep talk that the coach gives to his team just before the final clearly shows how & why SRK is so so ahead of his peer pack. Or the scene when Kabir Khan the wronged player leaves his ancestral home you can feel Kabir Khan absorbing all the insult to give it back some day.
Another noteworthy scene is a fight in a fast food joint (happens just before intermission) where girls thrash a gang of eve teasing boys. Ask any girl watching that and she will tell you how she relates to it and how it is a release of pent up feelings of hers on the screen. Or that scene where Kabir Khan feels happy watching a white (“Gora”) man hoisting Indian flag.
Earlier sports based movies have failed to draw audiences to hall but for Lagan. Even Lagan was long, took help of romance to make it more palpable and was quiet long. Not to forget Lagaan was based on Cricket, an overtly popular sport in India that grannies also understand.
The release timing of this movie could not have been better – around Independence Day. The day when even the most of us skeptics turn nationalistic.
I think it was clarity in the director’s head that has given Indian Cinema a different yet entertaining film so far seen in Hollywood. Indian Cinema is coming of age, Chak de Shimit Amin.
