A match made in showbiz

How Indian audiences learnt to love sports films

Sports movies pay, and how. The three major cash-earners - and pretty well-crafted in terms of quality too - scored big time: Sultan, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story and Dangal. And to think there was a time when sports on screen meant dicey business.
Take Aamir Khan as a cricketer in Awwal Number (1990) , Mithun Chakraborty leaping like Rocky Balboa in Boxer (1984), Kumar Gaurav wielding the willow in All Rounder (1984) or even Akshay Kumar versus Siddharth Malhotra punching it out  in the more recent Brothers (2015). Azhar (2016), the white-wash of a biopic on the controversies surrounding former Indian cricket captain Mohammad Azharuddin, has already faded from public memory. The cavalierly was either rejected, or at most tolerated, by the audiences. In short, the sports genre was considered to be jinxed by the trade trackers.
Signs of change in public response were first noticed with the global thumbs-up given to Lagaan (2001), which revolved around the spirit of India's freedom struggle - what with local, amateur underdogs batting it out triumphantly against a crusty team of the British Raj. Then Shah Rukh Khan had a winner, too, in YashRaj's Chak De! India (2007). Irrfan Khan and Farhan Akhtar, too, excelled in the athletics-centred biopics Paan Singh Tomar (2012) and Bhaag Mikha Bhaag (2013) respectively.
Small-scale sports films don't have an ice cube's chance in an inferno, though. The football flick Hip Hip Hurray (1984), starring Raj Kiran and Deepti Naval, and lately Saala Khadoos (2015), featuring a bunch of newcomers with R Madhavan as a boxing coach, didn't exactly attract queues at the ticket windows.
Clearly, the production budget must be cushy, the presence of a top-drawer star is absolutely essential, the publicity has to be extensive and a strong element of nationalist fervour has to be interwoven into the plot. 'We can beat world champions at the game' is the credo; in fact, it proved to be the rousing factor, especially in Dangal, which is expected to earn record-smashing profits at home and the overseas market.
Inevitably, the trade's knee-jerk reaction was to compare and contrast the box office figures of Sultan and Dangal.
Salman Khan smartly tweeted that he was envious of Aamir Khan, emphasising that his family, on viewing a preview of the latter, had remarked that it was a "better film" than his own blockbuster Sultan.
Whether one agrees with that tweet or not, the general feeling was that Salman Khan's Sultan was "more entertaining", what with its chartbusting songs and dance set pieces filmed in the patented Bollywood style. However, Dangal had a more folksy and rooted-to-the-soil flavour. Toss a coin for the flavour preferred.
On the positive side, the theme of Dangal ­- adapted from the real-life story of wrestling champ Mahavir Singh Phogat of Haryana ­- underscored the equality of genders in sports. This point was effectively rendered in Chak De! India as well but not with the emotional wallop achieved by director Nitesh Tiwari in Dangal. Mahavir Singh, excellently enacted by Aamir Khan, was dismayed when all the four children born to him were daughters - till he realised that two of them, Geeta and Babita, could be international champs at female wrestling events, which they did by returning home with the gold and silver medals respectively at the Commonwealth Games, six years ago.
By contrast, the aspiring woman wrestler (Anushka Sharma) of Sultan couldn't quite translate her dreams into reality, and was seconded by the hero in the screenplay, which was purely fiction.
Without dwelling on  the semantics of gender parity, it'd suffice to say that in advancing a purposeful message (for want of a better term), Dangal has an edge. Moreover, the actors portraying Geeta and Babita ­- Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra, as well as their childhood versions Zaira Wasim and Suhani Bhatnagar - knocked out performances that were nothing short of inspiring.
Incidentally, Nitesh Tiwari had earlier extracted brilliant work from an ensemble cast of child actors in Chillar Party (2011), which he co-directed, as well as from the brilliant Ritwik Sansore in Ferrari Ki Sawaari (2012). The enormously gifted Ritwik is an integral part of Dangal too, as the girls' much-harangued cousin, supplying the much-needed comic relief in the film's 161-minute first-half.
Undoubtedly, Dangal is a significant and stirring film, enticing quite a few observers to declare it as the best from the Bollywood bowl of 2016. I wouldn't quite go with that, though. In their own diametrically different ways, Neerja, Aligarh, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story and Pink were outstanding achievements.
Sure, there were only a fistful of such quality-conscious  products during the year gone by. Picking the single best of 2016 among them is a matter of individual choice. Or to put it in show town's familiar phrase, "pasand apni apni".
wknd@khaleejtimes.com