Sarbjit
By
Omung Kumar
The world will never know the truth of Sarbjit Singh. Was he a spy? Was he falsely implicated or just a victim of mistaken identity? There was a lot of potential to explore both sides of the argument, but the director chose to make a linear cinema with hardly any punch.
Are we or his family or the govt doing a disservice to Sarabjit by not accepting him as a spy (even though he might have been)? The problem with this line of thinking is that he was not tried for just being a spy but for his role in Lahore blasts where innocents were killed. This made him an untouchable for the Indian establishment. Besides, accepting him as one even after his tragic death might make the lives of other alleged spies and prisoners in Pakistani jails worse than they already are.
The problem with cinema as a medium is it can't hope to recover the costs if it doesn’t manage to tell a convincing story, truth be damned. Omung Kumar is an ordinary director anyway. He has played to the gallery and made a film for the masses providing justification for everything that happened. The first half of the film where the idyllic family life of Sarabjit is shown comes across as farcical.
Why would one cast Aishwarya as Dalbir Kaur? She was not even that bankable a star in 2016. A Bangaluru girl cast as a woman hailing from western Punjab! They had Richa Chadha at their disposal who does very well as Sarbjit’s wife. She is perhaps the best actress presently and would have done Dalbir’s role more convincingly. Omung Kumar has his own sensibilities. He cast Priyanka Chopra as Mary Kom which is basically taking much too liberty with the truth. If u just feel inspired and don't want to stick to the facts and adhere only to the spirit of the story, make a fictional film, for god’s sake. Just don't call it a biopic then.
I can draw a perverse kind of satisfaction from Omung’s choices.A Punjabi girl from Bareilly manages to play a boxer from Manipur. People even accepted a Bangalore girl in the role of a rural Punjabi woman (considering that both the films were hits). Bollywood, for howsoever big a joke it might be is still an instrument of national integration. Would I ever accept Brad Pitt as Mohammad Ali, or Denzel Washington as Xi Jinping? This is not racism, but about race.
Randeep Hooda has always been a reliable performer. Darshan Kumar as a Pakistani lawyer who fights for Sarbjit is terrific. It's just Aish and the director who let the film down.
With such material at his disposal, the least he could have done was to make a watchable film in the memory of Sarbjit. But Omung Kumar is really overrated.
#sarbjit #randeephooda #omungkumar #aishwaryarai #richachadha #spy
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