The film stars Akshay Kumar, Radhika Madan, Paresh Rawal. Despite some turbulence in the writing, this is a feel-good story where the woman is as important as the man.
Sudha Kongara’s biggest strength as a director may be her ability to lock on to the wavelength of an actor. By the time Soorarai Pottru came out, Suriya had long established himself as a good actor, especially under filmmakers with a unique sensibility. (NGK, for instance: the film may not have come together, but Suriya was fantastically intense.) But in Soorarai Pottru – in his National Award-winning portrayal of a small man with big dreams of building a low-cost airline – Suriya tapped into zones we’d never seen him in. It’s the same with Akshay Kumar in the Hindi remake, Sarfira. His character is named Vir, and he has rarely seemed so vulnerable on screen. (We may have to go back to something like Waqt: A Race Against Time to see Akshay’s spirit so repeatedly bruised and beaten.) At one point, when Vir’s dreams are dashed yet again, the camera moves in close. Vir is weeping, and the salt-and-pepper beard makes the man look even more defeated, as though even age is not on his side. Then, in a flash, Vir sees the man responsible for his plight (Paresh Rawal, standing in for the classist System), and his sadness turns to anger. The instant change of emotion is powerful. This is a committed, charismatic performance.
It’s not that Akshay Kumar has not given worthwhile performances earlier, but of late, his (apparent) tendency to rush through multiple films that have (apparently) been put together hastily has reduced him to an actor who’d rather let his screen presence, his stardom, do the “acting”. But in Sarfira, we see the Akshay we last saw in Atrangi Re, as a character who has to rise above a deeply messy situation. The instant tendency for those who have seen Soorarai Pottru may be to compare the two leading men, but it helps that Sudha (and her co-writer Shalini Ushadevi) do not deliver an exact remake. Take the superb, psychologically inward-looking scene where Suriya hesitates to ask his wife for money. You could see him struggle to bring out the words, which seemed stuck in his throat. The same moment plays very differently, more casually in Sarfira. What, earlier, looked like a scene constructed specifically around this single moment now comes across more organically, like it is yet another walk-and-talk conversation between Vir and his wife Rani (Radhika Madan). These changes are the reason we get a different tonality of performance instead of an actor merely mimicking what an earlier actor did.
We see Sudha’s facility with actors Seema Biswas (brilliant as Vir’s mother) and Radhika Madan, too. Radhika takes what could have been a one-note feisty character and makes Rani a caring companion. It’s all in the writing, of course, but the actors wring out every last drop of emotion from every page. As for the non-character writing – that is, the story and the flow of events – Sarfira is very much like its predecessor. The film starts on a high, literally in the skies, and the heavy-duty drama slowly gets grounded as Rani and Vir meet and discuss their respective business ideas. It’s lovely when the hero of a film has a solid ambition. It’s lovelier when the heroine has one, too. She wants to run a bakery. The loveliest touch is when they make a pact (her suggestion) that their earnings go into a common pool. It’s not his income or hers, but theirs. I don’t think I’ve seen household financial decisions being depicted on screen ever, less so when the couple is yet to get married. It’s like a desi version of a prenuptial agreement. But in other places, the writing shows signs of turbulence. Take the stretch where Vir’s father is dying and he finds – at the ticket counter in the airport – that he does not have enough money. He approaches other passengers in the airport, all of whom refuse to help, and he is soon reduced to a sobbing mess.
But the relationship between Vir and his father hasn’t been as well-etched out as the one between Vir and Rani, so the breakdown comes across like a standalone scene, like something from an acting audition. Again, Akshay is terrific, but we are responding to an actor’s efforts, not a character’s plight. We’ve been air-dropped into this moment. We’ve not arrived at it organically. The attempt is to make a crowd-pleasing, mainstream movie from the story of Air Deccan founder GR Gopinath, who recorded his tale in a book titled Simply Fly. In some places, it’s the screenplay that seems… simpli-flied. All biopics (even fictionalised ones) have the same arc: failure, failure, failure, success. You have to do something to vitalise this failure, failure, failure, success. That Sudha does. Like Niketh Bommireddy’s floating camera in the scenes with Vir, Sudha wants her film to stay airborne at all times. So the film, sometimes, seems to be a series of event after breathless event. And in these stretches, I longed for a breather. I longed for a shot as basic as, say, Vir running his hands over the surface of one of the planes he had fought so hard to get. It can’t all be noble-minded social service. (“I need to make flying cheaper for the masses.”) Some of it has to be personal, too (“Damn, I did it!”).
The scenes that do breathe, therefore, stand out. When Vir’s father dies and he confronts his mother, there is blessedly no background score. We are driven by the power of the words, by the power of the emotional situation, by the power of the performances. And when the score slowly begins to ripple in, through piano notes, the emotional high becomes higher without the sense of us being emotionally mangled and manipulated. Like Soorarai Pottru, Sarfira is a solid movie that just stops short of becoming something special. The emotional portions work very well. The event portions, less so. But this is also no lazy remake. They have looked carefully at the original, identified things that could be bettered or simply changed – and pesky critics be damned, they have retained the big, flavourful, massy moments that are calculated to bring a lump in the throat. I am talking about the scene at the post office with all the villagers backing Vir when he is at his lowest. I am talking about Rani telling Vir that self-pity is not an attractive quality. Looking back, the biggest achievements of these two films may not be in showing a man achieving his dream but in showing how a woman is such an integral part of this dream: both financially and emotionally. This is not a flavour you usually find in our films, and this is the smooth runway on which Sarfira takes off and lands.
