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Release
date:
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June 5,
2019
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Directors:
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Ali Abbas Zafar
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Cast:
Language:
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Salman Khan,
Katrina Kaif, Sunil Grover, Jackie Shroff, Disha Patani, Sonali Kulkarni,
Brijendra Kala, Kumud Kumar Mishra, Rajiv
Gupta, Shashank Arora, Aasif Sheikh, Satish Kaushik, Nora Fatehi, Cameo: Tabu
Hindi
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At a crucial point
in Ali Abbas Zafar’s new venture, the titular protagonist’s father appears to
him and says: “Desh logon se banta hai,
aur logon ki pehchaan unke
parivaar se hoti hai. Tujh mein poora desh hai, Bharat.” (A nation is
made up of people, and people’s identity comes from their family. The whole
country resides in you, Bharat.) It is a line that at once sounds profound but
means little. It also encapsulates the essence of Bharat: a film that wants to be profound but ends up meaning far
less despite its bull’s-eyes.
Salman Khan
partnered Zafar on the writer-director’s Sultan
and Tiger Zinda Hai with spectacular
box-office outcomes. Whatever their lacunae may have been, Zafar was
successful in mining Khan’s natural goofiness in both, the latter film also
playing up the actor’s trademark unembarrassed, unapologetic on-screen bravado
to hilarious effect. Bharat sputters
on that front but scores elsewhere with mixed results: it is occasionally heart-breaking,
occasionally funny, often political albeit hesitantly so, but by and large just
plain dull.
Based on the Korean
film Ode To My Father, Bharat is a voyage through post-Independence India while walking alongside a
common man whose name is Bharat with no surname attached. He was a boy
of 8 and a resident of Gaon Mirpur, Lahore, when
his life was torn apart by the cruelty of
Partition. His entire existence since has been devoted to keeping the promise
made to his Dad (Jackie Shroff) that he would take care of the family.
When we first meet
him he is an old man touching 70. As the extended family gathers for his
birthday, Bharat (played by Khan) recounts his journey between 1947 and 2010 in
flashback. Along the way, several familiar historical milestones are crossed.
Post-Partition refugee camps, Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, India’s 1983 cricket
World Cup victory, economic liberalisation in the 1990s, the 21st century
television boom and more pass by parallel to Bharat’s initial struggle to
survive in Delhi, his time as a daredevil motorbike rider in a circus,
migration to the Middle East for work, his life-long friendship with the banana-eating Syyed Vilayati Khan (Sunil Grover), his long-standing
relationship with the government official turned TV anchor Kumud Raina (Katrina
Kaif) and unexpected good news.
The voiceover in
the trailer had announced, “this country was born 71 years back...” Why then
does Bharat’s story stop not at 2018
but at 2010 with the words “the beginning” on screen? Therein lies a tale.
Clearly Zafar wants to make a political statement yet stay safe while doing so
(the fact that he needs to protect himself is a sad reflection
on the current state of our nation, but that is a separate discussion). The
1990s are heralded in the film with the narrator announcing that the new decade
was marked by the arrival of two new heroes, Shah Rukh Khan (that’s very
generous of you, Bhai) and Sachin Tendulkar, “but the real hero was (Finance
Minister) Manmohan Singh” for transforming India’s economy. This is an
unexpected ode to the former FM-turned-PM who has been much maligned, reviled
and mocked in the public discourse in the past 5 years, most recently in the
Hindi film PM Narendra Modi. Another
former PM much reviled in recent years is projected as a hottie earlier in the
film.
While both comments
in Bharat are in themselves brave in
the sense that they defy the mob, I suppose the decision to steer clear of 2014 too can
be deemed a statement, its import possibly depending on
which side of the political divide you stand on.
Clever? Somewhat. And if you think about it, amusingly so.
The format of this
film is brimming with potential, and has been tapped brilliantly by cinema in
the past, Hollywood’s Forrest Gump being a shining example. For the most part
though, the historical events cited in Bharat
serve more as markers of dates rather than having any interesting or deep connotation in the context of the leading man’s bio. Combine that
with the absence of the usual crowd-pleasing Salman Khan madness, and Bharat ends up being neither here nor
there.
The humour, for
one, is weak. I mean, c’moooon, Bharat’s Mummy says “Tonsil” for “Titanic”
(the ship) and he corrects her, pronouncing the word as “Titonic” instead. Aiyyo! Eye roll. Oddly enough, the
comedy works in its most juvenile portions because those parts are headlined by
the inimitable Sunil Grover or Rajiv Gupta.
The two ace their respective scenes.
Khan and Kaif, on
the other hand, are off the mark and off colour throughout. Nope, even when
Bharat addresses Kumud as “Madam Sir” with the actor’s signature cutesiness it
falls flat. Kaif’s Hindi diction has always been problematic, here it is not
even papered over with the by-now-standard her-character-grew-up-outside-India
excuse and the way she says the English word “store” more than once in a particular scene is very
distracting.
Like the duo’s
performances, Bharat’s songs too are
lacklustre. Irshad Kamil’s lyrics for Slow
motion are kinda entertaining, Zinda
is sorta catchy, but on the whole I found myself
wondering when Vishal and Shekhar will next come up with a soundtrack to match
the memorability they delivered in Dostana.
No doubt Zafar
means well with Bharat, but his
writing often unwittingly displays his social conditioning even when he is
attempting a progressive message. This is epitomised by a scene in which Bharat
tries to convince an African pirate that there is no colour prejudice in India,
which is ironic considering that their conversation is contained in a scene featuring
a racist joke about a black-skinned south Indian man.
Unlike the recent Bollywood release Kalank, the
villains of Partition in Bharat are
not confined to the Muslim community. In a decade when the world and India have
been engulfed by Islamophobia, this is significant. However, Zafar’s decision
to include the national anthem right in the middle of the film should be
questioned, knowing as we do that the anthem has been a source of tension in
some halls in recent years with certain audience members choosing to use it as
a tool to vent a certain nationalist aggression against others.
At another place
Zafar questions the need for marriage, which is a gutsy thing to do for a Hindi
filmmaker – and then he pulls back. And the way Disha Patani’s character enters
then abruptly exits the scene becomes yet another instance of the
dispensability of glamorous women in commercial Hindi cinema.
The best of Bharat comes right in the beginning and
then almost towards the end. The initial portrayal of the Partition and later
efforts to reunite families separated at the time may seem emotionally
over-wrought to some, but I confess I was reduced to tears in both segments.
Unfortunately, what comes between, though
largely inoffensive is only sporadically rewarding. Far from being a Forrest Gump with Salman Khan, Bharat is
mostly a plodding trek through post-1947 to contemporary India.
Rating (out
of five stars): **
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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155 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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