a friend's review of bhaag milkha bhaag

Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. -----Tony Judt



Running is good for the body, but does it serve a body of history? Watching a super athlete at the height of his powers can be a magical sight, but can this powerfully bewitching experience be transplanted to the screen with the fluidity and ease which an athlete always displays running a competitive race. If you watch Bollywood's biopic of Milkha Singh's life, you would probably think not.

Milkha's an awe-inspiring story, of courage, grit and determination. A penniless, orphaned youth devastated by Partition building his life anew to become India's best athlete. Battling adverse circumstances, the athlete earned the sobriquet of Flying Sikh through dauntlessness that is beyond the wild imaginations of many of us.

Bollywood's Milkha, written by ad agency McCann-Erickson's India boss Prasoon Joshi, works more like a 3-hour-long ad film than a cinematic representation of the athlete's super-achiever life that will stay imprinted on your consciousness like Mikha's races or the Partition, the havoc this nation witnessed at Independence, have on ours.

Director Rakeysh Mehra's visuals of the Partition, with whinnying black horses and slow-motion, almost robotic decapitation of Sikhs, present a bizarre, consumerist version of a traumatic moment in nation's history. The brutal swiftness and colossal rages of the Partition are reduced to mere Dolbyfied clip-clops of horses ridden by draped-in-black killers who take an eternity to emerge into the foreground to behead Sikhs, at perhaps 16 frames a second like an ad film for a shiny car whose alloy wheels sink into your senses in slow motion.

Mehra and Joshi, perhaps grown on the flatness and inanition of ad films, diminish the ravages of Partition to slapdash visuals which seem to have jumped out from some Playstation game inspired by Hollywood films such as 300. And, mind you, this is the shocking, psychologically scarring blow that ultimately makes Milkha the man he becomes!

 Mouthing cliches, the fearless community of Sikhs in a Multan village goes down, hacked dramatically by horse riders who descend on this small bunch of foolhardy families from a magical parting in the waters. They kill wantonly and vanish, perhaps into the waters whence they emerged, leaving blood and gore and a heap of bodies being pelted with furious rain. Milkha, who has run away from the killers, returns to see his entire family slain. The rain hasn't let up. Milkha slips on blood and slush. The rain forms small rivulets of blood and loose mud, and Milkha cries.

The scene, a perfect picture-postcard rendering of the mayhem of Partition, doesn't reveal the emotionally unhinging moments that were the loci of Partition. In fact, the scene is apt to  run with a tagline: Partition Makes Athletes. Of course, the seriousness of it doesn't make you believe that it is an Happydent ad, but the flatness and vapidity of it reduces it to just that. A Happydent version of the Partition.

And then Joshi's jingle, Ab tu bhaag Milkha (now you run, Milkha), takes over, and Milkha runs over hills and dales with a body that is chiselled to perfection. Mehra's visuals stun with the celebration of the body, but not the man. You lock your senses and mindlessly follow the story, a hodgepodge of filtered flashbacks and Bollywood-style romantic love. Carrying buckets of water, Milkha falls in love. (Buckets are potent symbols of Milkha's sheer guts; he fills buckets with his sweat after running in the broiling heat.)

Together, Milkha and his beloved sit at the edge of the old, British-built bridge connecting the eastern parts to the old city of Delhi, where, as in ad for some fancy fan, the girl's red dupatta goes flying into the serene Yamuna. No one, not even a soul, is on the bridge. Any intrusion, human or otherwise, will only obfuscate the gospel of love Mehra is trying to spread. Strange. Considering the bridge was the only link between the old city and its derelict suburbs like Shahdara where distressed refugees went in search of work from their ramshackle tenements.

Probably Mehra and Joshi want nothing to come between the paradisaical love between Milkha and his inamorata who, strangely, smiles like a Colgate ad, the worries of displacement discarded into the holy river, just like her unfurled dupatta, that flows calmly beneath their amorous frolicking.

Mehra and Joshi should have studied some books on the carve-up of India such as Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence, a searing study on how women suffered and were affected badly by the emotional upset of a sundered India. Even Manto's superb and sagacious portraits of Partition would have helped. This story is of course Milkha's, but the woman who stood by him, his sister, plays a significant role in forging his steel. Again, Mehra and Joshi reduce his hapless sister to a caricature of a woman who, living in a tent with her family members and Milkha, has to go through the humiliation of her rowdy husband's demands for raucous sex.

After the tight slap of displacement, dehumanising sex and utter subjection of women were common (and still are) in the patriarchal, feudal set of refugees who came from the other side of the line and Mehra and Joshi do well to draw our attention to this gross unjustness.

But they, sadly, can't suppress their ad genes for long and make even the sex, with all its guttural sounds, so cliched and puerile and abject that one wonders if they know cinema, like all arts, is a subtle medium. A slight hint or even an allusion is enough to convey the message. Ads, of course, have to be direct, and don't work by implication; their message shouts hard and clear from the visuals. Just like Mehra and Joshi's does.

Loudness, of course, remains the bane of Bollywood, but a biopic on as inspiring personality as Milkha should have given the duo of Mehra and Joshi some pause. It was a great opportunity for both to dispense with the cliches of Bollywood and script and film an idiom that, like Milkha, could have broken some, if not all, boundaries.

Not only have they failed miserably, but they have minified filmmaking to a level of coarseness where the message comes screaming at us from the edge of the bridges, sculpted bodies, fake rivalries, and from jingly lyrics.

-- Rakesh Bedi