Ali Abbas Zafar’s Bharat, starring Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif, subverts one key rule of a superstar film right at the start.
Most Bollywood films present their heroes – some well into their 50s – as young aggressive men, but in Bharat, which opens in Delhi in 2010, the eponymous protagonist (Khan) is 70 years old.
But look closely and you’ll find that it is just an old wine in an… old bottle. Bharat may be 70, but he displays no infirmity of the old age – neither in looks nor in machismo – he’s as threatening, as overbearing, as any other Bollywood hero.
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The same’s true for the female lead, Kaif, who is presumably nearing 70 as well, but looks closer to 35, 45, or 55 – who’s to say?
You understand the intention: Zafar wants his film to be ‘different’, and yet doesn’t want to alter his actors’ appearances or mannerisms. Because for many Bollywood filmmakers, box-office collections reign supreme, and age is, well, just a number.
This strange conceit though still makes you curious. How will a Bollywood film treat a hero cast as a 70-year-old? We don’t have to worry: the film cuts to a flashback 63 years ago.
Seven-year-old Bharat is in Mirpur, a city in Pakistan, boarding a train to India with his family, amid a murderous mob. Bharat, his mother, and his younger brother board the train, while his father (Jackie Shroff) and his younger sister get lost in the crowd.
Bharat’s family goes to Delhi, to stay with his aunt, who owns a small shop in the city, where his father had told to meet him. That small shop then – “Hind Ration Store” – acquires momentous meanings for the boy: it is the only link to his past, connecting him to his father and sister, a sore reminder of what he had, and what he lost.
Bharat befriends Vilayat (Sunil Grover), a young boy in a refugee camp, and embarks on a lifetime adventure with him. As adults, they first join a local circus – with Bharat racing bikes in a well and Vilayat betting on his friend – and then find more stable employments.
Bharat, by then, switches to the template of a staple Bollywood melodrama: You get the heroics of the hero, the comical antics of the sidekick and, of course, songs – none of them hummable, all of them planted in the story because, well, that is how a big budget Bollywood film is supposed to be. And given that this story is set in the past, possibly in line with the current national mood, there are a couple of jokes on Jawaharlal Nehru – jokes that are not as much about him as much on him.
But even amid the customary sloppiness, you can see an alternate story emerging – a story that, you feel, holds some promise. Bharat, it soon becomes clear, is not just the story of one man but, through his journey, also the retelling of a nation.
In the mid ’60s, when the country had numerous jobless youngsters, Bharat and Vilayat walk into the office of a National Employment Exchange in search of a job. The friends move from one job to the other – first as construction workers in the oil fields of the Middle East, then as technicians on a merchant navy in Aden – and we get some sense of the desperation and ambition of young Indians back then: neither long hours nor a long stretch of period away from home was a deterrent, something that’s true even today.
We even get a scene where Bharat is trapped in a cave, about to die, and then sees his life flash in front of him. He’s floating in the cave, drowning in the bright light of an afternoon sun: it’s a small scene, remarkably quiet (at least by the standards of a Khan movie), and it takes you by surprise.
This is an ambitious approach – and no wonder the film is inspired by a South Korean drama Ode to My Father (2014) – but Bharat is frequently let down by a sprawling script that has way too many convenient plot turns. Bharat’s reason for not marrying his supervisor, Kumud (Kaif), whom he calls “madam sir”, is ludicrous (and no, it’s not because she’s his boss); ditto for his reason for never going to Pakistan to look for his missing father.
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The film often tells us about Bharat’s relationship with his father — the scene at the station, in fact, is shown in multiple flashbacks to forge an emotional connect with audience — but it looks tenuous and contrived. And that is so because Zafar (also the screenplay writer) hardly invests any time, or effort, in making us understand Bharat’s loss, what it did to his psyche, how it changed him as a person.
This detail then, just like several others in the movie – India winning the cricket world cup in 1983, the onset of economic liberalisation, the rise of Shahrukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar – seem ornamental at best, designed to check a list, as opposed to understanding the story’s world.
Even a mediocre script, though, can be lifted by good acting. But there’s no such luck here.
Khan – so afraid of being vulnerable on screen – is as unimpressive as ever, and so is the rest of the cast, with Kaif (who is a slight improvement) and Grover (funny, sharp, always in tune with the demands of the scene) as minor exceptions.
After a point, this film is so devoid of ideas that it resorts to making fun of a character with speech defect, tries to emotionally manipulate us through a five-year-old girl (who, of course, reminds Bharat of his sister), keeps injecting pathos via a mawkish subplot about families separated during partition — and obviously, in a film about India, the characters, without much context, break into a national anthem. (No one in my theatre stood up.)
But as always, like most Bollywood dramas, this movie, too, (unintentionally) critiques itself. In one scene, Kaif tells Khan, “Tum na bahut hi self-obsessed aadmi ho.”
Ah, the small joys of a Bollywood ‘entertainer’.