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Film review: Sarbjit is a tragedy in capital letters

Film review: Sarbjit is a tragedy in capital letters

The loud and insistent melodrama takes away from the pathos of the central character’s story
Updated 21 May, 2016

In her new movie Sarbjit, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan comes to work with her greatest asset – her gorgeous face. In scene after scene, Rai Bachchan flashes her eyes, curls her lips, flares her nostrils and twists her features out of shape.

Sarbjit is the kind of movie in which emotions are deemed unworthy of existence unless they are screamed out with every sinew strained. It’s more labour than Rai Bachchan has ever performed in her spotty career, and if nothing else, she deserves full marks for effort.

Directed by Omung Kumar, the production designer-turned-tear harvester, Sarbjit is based on the real-life account of the unfortunate Sarabjit Singh. Singh was arrested by Pakistani border guards in 1990, accused of being an Indian spy who had been involved in bomb blasts in Lahore and Faisalabad, and thrown into prison. His sister, Dilraj Kaur, proclaimed his innocence and campaigned tirelessly for his release. But Singh languished on death row until he was killed in an attack by prison inmates in 2013.

Opinion is divided on Singh’s real identity: was he a low-level intelligence operative who made the mistake of being caught or a farmer who strayed into Pakistan and paid heavily for his mistake? The former theory could have made a fascinating scapegoats-of-statecraft account. But it’s far easier to make a three-hankie weepie about an innocent man who suffered along with his family, and that’s just what Omung Kumar has done.

Randeep Hooda (left) as Sarbjit Singh
Randeep Hooda (left) as Sarbjit Singh

The 132-minute movie opens in the border village where Sarbjit (Randeep Hooda) lives with his wife Sukhpreet (Richa Chadha), two infant daughters and his widower father. Dilraj (Rai Bachchan), who is deeply attached to her brother, has left her husband and returned to her family (in real life, Singh was part of a much larger brood).

When Sarbjit accidentally crosses the border in a drunken state and is jailed on charges of spying, Dilraj swings into action. She bangs away at her sewing machine with determination, stomps through the corridors of power to persuade officials of her brother’s innocence, and delivers lectures on Indo-Pak peace on every possible occasion. Sukhpreet, depicted as a diffident and docile woman, contributes to the general hysteria by fainting at opportune moments.

Some moving sequences survive the delirium. In an early scene that establishes the relationship between the siblings, Sarbjit persuades Dilraj to give up the corpse of her stillborn child – a rare moment of subtlety. In a later conversation, Sarbjit dismisses his sister’s despair that her efforts have been futile. “What have you done for me?” he tells her. "You made my name roam free across the world."

Meanwhile, Sarbjit wastes away, his wrestler’s body and mind eaten up by his miserable conditions and the lasting regret that he was in the wrong place in the wrong time.

Despite the title, it’s Dilraj who drives the story, refusing to accept her brother’s seemingly inevitable fate and making enough of a ruckus this side of the border to buy him a longer lease of life at the other end. By the second half, even Hooda, who is convincing in the initial sequences, cannot be unaffected by the overwrought air around him and contributes his own overly dramatic bits to a movie that refuses to quiet down.

Randeep has evidently worked hard to fully embrace the character
Randeep has evidently worked hard to fully embrace the character

Were it stripped of its insistent melodrama, Sarbjit might have been an interesting (if heavily fictionalised) account of an ordinary family caught in the midst of a geopolitical war. The screenplay by Utkarshini Vashishtha and Rajesh Beri has its share of anti-Pakistan sentiment, but it takes care to humanise ordinary Pakistanis, who are shown as helping Sarbjit, whether it’s smuggling letters to him in prison or standing up to represent him in court despite criticism (the lawyer Awaid Shaikh’s character is played by Darshan Kumar).

The writers put Sarbjit’s fate against the backdrop of repeated terrorist attacks on India, but the jingoism is dialled down to the minimum requirement. They also slip in the point that there are many Sarabjits in Indian prisons. Some moving sequences survive the delirium. In an early scene that establishes the relationship between the siblings, Sarbjit persuades Dilraj to give up the corpse of her stillborn child – a rare moment of subtlety. A family reunion before Sarbjit’s death is bathed in bathos, but manages to be touching in its portrayal of the family’s enduring loss. In a later conversation, Sarbjit dismisses his sister’s despair that her efforts have been futile. “What have you done for me?” he tells her. "You made my name roam free across the world."

But some of the lines are unintelligible. In an effort to reach for authenticity, much of the dialogue is in unsubtitled Punjabi. Hooda, who is from Haryana, and Chadha, who is from Delhi, manage their bits but here again, Rai Bachchan flounders. Her accent wavers wildly, but then the director did make his debut in 2014 with the similarly loud boxing drama on the Manipuri boxer Mary Kom that starred Priyanka Chopra. If Chopra could pass off as a Manipuri athlete, a dubious Punjabi accent can be overlooked.

Sarbjit has some lovely and expressive faces, but not all of them are suited for their parts. The talented Richa Chadha has barely anything to do, and gets her big moment only in a scene in which she gently reproaches her sister-in-law for her martyr complex. Hooda is similarly reduced to playing a half-mad prisoner with a gleam in his eye, evoking little else than pity.

The movie is unfortunately driven by Dilraj. Rai Bachchan has been working hard to shed her famously icy demeanour. In Jazbaa, she played a lawyer who is forced to defend a rapist in order to free her kidnapped daughter, but that performance resulted in more memes than encomiums.

It’s more labour than Rai Bachchan has ever performed in her spotty career, and if nothing else, she deserves full marks for effort
It’s more labour than Rai Bachchan has ever performed in her spotty career, and if nothing else, she deserves full marks for effort

Will Sarbjit suffer the same fate as Jazbaa? Rai Bachchan literally yells out her intention to be taken seriously as an actress in her new innings, but she might actually have been better cast as Sukhpreet, who passively watches her sister-in-law create dust storms while she waits for a husband who never returns. The face is still a draw, but it cannot support the strain of working overtime.


This article, originally published at Scroll.in, has been reproduced with permission.

Comments

Rohit May 21, 2016 01:37pm
utter waste of money.....Aishwarya Ria in a serious role is joke in itself
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Sunil May 21, 2016 02:21pm
Aishwarya Rai screaming sounds funny.
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Ahmad May 21, 2016 02:41pm
@Rohit You must be from congress !
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DG May 21, 2016 03:05pm
@ Rohit and your claim to fame and achievement is?
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syed May 21, 2016 03:34pm
not taking anything away from radeeps weight loss but wasn't sarbjit fat in his last few days...I mean look at the media images of him in hospital...if anything he should have gained weight for the role
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charu May 21, 2016 03:47pm
useless movie...shor sharaba....not even worth the torrent
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Pakistani May 21, 2016 04:04pm
Reminds me of our soldier Maqbool Hussain who was captured by India in 1965 and released after 40 years in 2005.
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ZAFAR May 21, 2016 04:12pm
True story. Whole India already knew and sympathized with him. Let's see how good the movie is now.
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Erik May 21, 2016 04:53pm
Did they show in the movie the plight of those whose loved ones were killed by Sarbjit's terrorist acts in Pakistan?
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Khilari May 21, 2016 05:16pm
For once , Bollywood should make a movie on Pakistanis caught on their side of border , labelled as spies and still languishing and in extreme cases die, unheard, in their jails. Some of them are still alive and begged to be heard.
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obivankanobi May 21, 2016 06:18pm
There was no need to tale Aishwariya at all. She has never been known to be a great actress and on typical Bollywood tradition the casting took precedence over the story itself. An actress of the calibre of Nadita Das or Kangana Ranaut should have been taken instead of a glamour queen whose histrionics is suspect at best and has only glam value thereby compromising on the quality and diluting the importance of the protagonist.
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Adeel Zahid May 21, 2016 08:00pm
Sorry but its a shame that even in India they make movies on terrorist and show sympathies towards him I won't show any sympathies to anyone who involved in terrorism. This guy was arrested convicted and have his confession where he agreed being RAW Agent and did those blast and now asking for Mercy ? after killing 35 poeple you are asking for a mercy ? media showing emotional sotry by showing his family sister and other aspects am I missing a point that he was a terrorist who was arrested and been punished
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Jk22 May 21, 2016 08:25pm
@Pakistani he was released unlike sarabjit !
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Jk22 May 21, 2016 08:27pm
@Khilari its same story to other side too. This guy got attention because of the efforts his sister put in for his release.
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Indian Guy May 21, 2016 09:57pm
its an Indian movie, so obviously will have indian perspective. There are numerous Pakistanis and Indians languishing in each others jails, each deserving of their story being written. I'm just amused at how Dawn took the worst review from an Indian source and used it to trash the movie. Quiet predictable. Will the media ever have the maturity to say "good movie, but we don't agree with their depiction of Pakistan"?
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deepak ravi May 21, 2016 10:47pm
@Pakistani Soldier captured is not unusual. This is a farmer we are talking of.
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Ajay Vikram Singh May 21, 2016 11:06pm
To all Sarabjits ...( Pakistanis too) - May you all go back home soon. Amen!
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AHMED May 21, 2016 11:55pm
Yawn!!! Another day another hate Pakistan propaganda movie from Bollywood. I wish the producer of this movie has some courage to show the mutilated bodies of those people who were killed by Mr sarabit's Bomb Blast.
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Hassan May 22, 2016 12:21am
I am disgusted by all the comments here. Shame on you all, using this for point scoring. Sarbjit Singh was murdered by the inmates in jail, it was a crime putting him among the general populace of the jail, it is same as putting a sheep a cage full of wolfs. What madness. I can only hope this movie does justice to Sarbjit Singh's legacy, if we do not learn. Some one else will surely suffer, and that be a Pakistani or an Indian.
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Azhar Yousafzai May 22, 2016 07:22am
@Jk22 Yes he was released after cutting his tongue. He spent his prime years in prison and is unable to speak a word .. what a favour to release him..
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Naim Irfaz May 22, 2016 07:34am
This movie portrays the sad affairs of our once great state of a united Punjab and what it has become today. Tragically Sarabjit was a Punjabi who strayed into a Punjab land he was not allowed to access and sadly was charged of spying on other Punjabis, and later he was killed by fellow Punjabis in a Punjab Jail and cremated in Punjab too.
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Mako ur May 22, 2016 10:12am
Indian media is fascinated with anti Pakistan movies because there is a huge market for it. It would be nice to make a sequel that shows the story of bomb victims of Sarbjit.
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khuram May 22, 2016 11:17am
useless movie
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Reality May 22, 2016 01:20pm
The nation has been playing a Tom & Jerry like things for 68 years. It is a high time for both sides to stop playing for your non=sense attitudes and pay attention to real issues for the WHOLE nation. It is a high time for both sides to stop paying for the good deeds of your MASTERS and start paying back to the WHOLE nation.
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Khilari May 22, 2016 04:23pm
@Jk22 what was the name of that Indian prisoner released a year ago and the moment he landed in India declared that he was an Indian spy. Oh yes, Surjeet Singh. Immediately after that we received the coffin of a civilian Pakistani prisoner in India who had died after being in prison for a long time. We returned Geeta, physically challenged girl, safe n sound to India. What did we get in return?
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Aamer May 23, 2016 11:03am
Aishwariya Rai should concentrate on one thing she is good at- looking glamorous and beautiful and leave acting for real actresses.
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apakmuslim May 23, 2016 11:07am
I am so glad for this movie. Exposes the torture experienced by a human being for a mistaken identity. Can't ask for a better thing
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Ajay Vikram Singh May 24, 2016 10:33am
@Naim Irfaz - Naim, well said. The most unfortunate thing is that Punjab got divided and Punjabis became refugees in their own land.
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