From Sakshi Tanwar to Girish Kulkarni to Sanya Malhotra to Aparshakti Khurrana (Thank you, Nair for the name!) - they all fit in perfectly. The rest of the cast – including Fatima Sana Shaikh – are all so refreshing. Some parts even convince you that the actor might be this tyrannical in real life too. Physique aside, we completely register Mahavir's frustration, anger, joy, conceit, hurt ego, pride. It is almost as if he shot the younger-Mahavir scenes while he was shooting for Dhoom 3. The actor himself does well from being athletic to pot-bellied.
It is a pleasant surprise to see Aamir Khan let the other characters take center stage - even if it is a side character like Mahavir's wife or his nephew – while he maintains his own screen presence.
For a lot of the journey, even though Mahavir Phogat is in the scene, your focus is on her. You empathise with her when her dad's aspirations are forced on her, you sympathise with her when she tries to wing out of her father's shadow. The protagonist here is not Mahavir Singh Phogat, it is his daughter – Geeta Kumari Phogat ( Zaira Wasim followed by Fatima Sana Shaikh). But, stronger themes like passion, woman empowerment, angst against system, take hold – none of which are new, but all are sewed together into a story that make you root for its protagonist. They dissipate along with Mahavir Singh Phogat's ( Aamir Khan) hopes of having a son. In fact, all my apprehensions - about an Aamir Khan film becoming more about Aamir Khan than the subject matter that he has taken to heart - melted with the first two scenes. This is so because at any given point there are lots of things at play and they all weave together seamlessly. I didn't mind sitting through almost an hour of only and only – wrestling matches. I didn't mind the occasional slack in pace. I didn't mind the usual “success goes to underdog's head” phase. I didn't mind the precious run-time spent on the usual rigorous training montages that go with this genre. In fact, you know how the last fight will end, and when the national anthem plays at the beginning you get an inkling of exactly how the audience is expected to react to that last fight. This is not to say that it is not as predictable as any underdog story. It is almost amusing that the movie turns a house of woman objectification into a study room to empower a woman. It even lets some of them run in parallel - all without losing sight of any single one – at the same time it creates and retains my interest in a sport, the existence of which is otherwise incomprehensible to me. But Dangal builds one theme on another relentlessly. Many a film that has tried this, has suffered from spreading itself too thin for its own good. Just the number of social topics that Dangal touches upon could've worked against the film.
0 kommentar(er)
