The Manoj Kumar of millennials, Akshay Kumar, can’t seem to get enough of India. The star has a new release, Gold, this Independence Day – this is not a coincidence, and the timing shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Independence Day weeks of 2016 and 2017, too, saw new releases of Kumar, Rustom and Toilet, nationalist dramas that pegged the actor as the poster boy of Bollywood patriotism. Besides these movies, Kumar has appeared in other similar films such as Pad Man, Naam Shabana and Airlift (the only well-made film of the lot and one that, for the most part, steered clear from chest-beating jingoism).
The new wave of nationalism in the country has, in fact, affected not just Kumar but also other actors. This has coincided with the rise of sports dramas in Bollywood, which, much like nationalist movies, come encoded with crowd-pleasing elements and, more importantly, a grand takeaway that should be agreeable to everyone: work hard, rise above your adversities and make your country proud. But the problem is turning it into a formula; waving the tricolour is the new dancing in the Swiss Alps. And the movie-going audiences, quick to roll up their windows at the sight of street urchins selling national flags, have legitimised this business, made it flourish.
Gold, co-written and directed by Reema Kagti, is a film that belongs to this school. It opens to the hockey finals of the 1936 Summer Olympics, between British India and Germany, in Berlin, when Adolf Hitler had recently gained power. The players, representing “British India” (a sleight of hand used for dramatic purposes – the team was simply known as “India” then), are faced with a unique predicament: they’re playing for their team and yet not for their country. They long to unfurl their country’s flag, sing India’s national anthem, after each victory, but, as people captive in their own lands are forced to sing their master’s tune.
This is an intriguing premise – one that needed the gentle caress of observation, but Kagti wields a sledgehammer instead. The German players, colliding with and knocking down Indian players, look no less than comic book villains. Even the referee is compromised. When the Indian team assembles during the half-time, they’re shaken by the assaults. You expect them to discuss strategy, new ways to defeat the Germans, but instead, Tapan Das (Kumar), the manager of the Indian team, clutches the tricolour and says, “We’ll play for this”. A rousing background score follows accompanied by visuals of every team member putting their hands on hearts. This on-the-nose simplistic writing, which neither respects the nuances of sport nor understands the fervour of representing one’s country, accurately distills the problem plaguing Bollywood sports dramas. It is a set-up where complexity and details are sacrificed at the altar of patriotism, which in itself is supposed to be enough.
Sports drama, as a genre, is filled with tropes and formulae. Often times, there’s a player who prioritises personal gains over collective efforts; there are tiffs among players; there’s a team manager (or coach), battling personal scars, who is up against institutional roadblocks. Chak De! India ticked all these boxes with élan more than a decade ago. Gold relies on such plot points too and, as a result, largely feels like a jaded drama.
For instance, when Tapan Das says, “I love hockey, I love my country,” you don’t feel a thing. That is mainly because Gold isn’t coming from a personal space. It is not trying to nail a particular story; it is rather more interested in hitchhiking a bandwagon whose music is all too familiar.
This lack of research is evident throughout the film, most conspicuously in Tapan’s Bollywoodised Bengali, which sounds caricaturised and inauthentic, containing lazy linguistic shorthands such as “oodibaba”, “tada-tadi”, “gondogol”. The president of the Indian Hockey Federation first withdraws and later approves the funds for the 1948 London Olympics with incredible ease. The subplot centred on another manager, jealous of Tapan and cynical of team’s chances, belongs to a bad TV serial.
Then there are scenes that service the whims of the star (Kumar) at the cost of credible storytelling. Tapan is an alcoholic, and a man devoid of restraint, so he often gets drunk at public gatherings and makes a fool of himself. (Gold gets two songs out of this, where Kumar hikes up his dhoti to do something that vaguely resembles a dance – a bizarre tonal variation that does this film no good.) If you’ve seen enough Hindi films, none of these would surprise you. Gold is predictable with a capital-P, the kind of film where the audience, easily able to guess the subsequent plot points, is always ahead of the filmmaker.
The film only comes alive in a short segment where the Partition divides not just the country but also disintegrates its hockey team, with some Muslim players migrating to Pakistan, and a few Anglo-Indians moving to Australia. Imtiaz Shah (Vineet Kumar Singh in a small charming performance) was once a star player of the Indian team, which won the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but post-independence plays for Pakistan. The film doesn’t deride his choice and accords his aspiration with the same dignity that it reserves for Indian players. (This portion also has a rare example of intelligent writing and attention to detail. In an early scene, Imtiaz, after getting wounded in a communal riot, suggests leaving India for Pakistan to another Muslim player. He disagrees and eventually scores the winning goal in the final of the 1948 Olympics.)
But apart from this fleeting flourish, Gold offers little joy. What is more disappointing about the film is that it’s helmed by Kagti, a filmmaker with a distinct voice who has made two features, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. and Talaash, in the past that dazzled in parts even if they struggled to bind as a whole. But with Gold, she seems to have been co-opted by the very industry she was slyly rebelling against. It is ironic and unfortunate that a tepid patriotic film has come at the cost of a promising filmmaker surrendering her imagination and freedom.