Sarfira
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal and Radhikka Madan
Directed by Sudha Kongara
Sudha Kongara’s Sarfira takes you by surprise. It is a solid entertainer about a man with the uni-focus of Arjun with that arrow and the fisheye. Sudha Kongara’s remake shouldn’t be dismissed just because it is what it is: a remake. True, the basic story about the man who dreamt of making air travel affordable for the poor, remains unchanged. As it should. Director Sudha Kongara and her co-writer Shalini Ushadevi have transcreated the Tamil original into a Maharastrian milieu without ruffling too many feathers.
I found the first fifteen minutes when Veer Mhatre (Akshay Kumar) deals with an aviation crisis (the pointer to a flashback) and his early marriage proposal to and courtship of his future wife Rani, to be annoyingly obstreperous, as though director Kongara was struggling to find a voice amidst the adaptative chaos. The background music tends to overpunctuate and overpower each sequence.
Eventually the narrative finds its groove and Kongara settles to tapping Gopinath alias Veer’s sanak, junoon, passion – whatever you want to call it—to somehow finds funds to fuel his dream of letting the poor touch the sky.
There is this ostensibly casual moment in the narrative where Veer Mhatre tells a naysayer (Oh, he encounters plenty of those, the more he is advised to abandon his seemingly scatterbrained dream, the more he..well dreams) , “It is not just the cost factor. I also want to eliminate the caste factor.”
This idea of social equality , the crux of Mhatre’s battle with opening up the sky for those who can’t afford to fly, is not punctuated as boldly as it was in the original Tamil film Soorarai Pottru. Is this a failing or an emergency door to ensure the message of social inequality doesn’t get offensive for any section of the audience?
There is so much in Sarfira that is deeply wounding. A lengthy sequence where Mhatre cannot travel by air in time to see his dying father, reminded me of Dilip Kumar’s celebrated sequence in Yash Chopra’s Mashaal where the Thespian tried to stop the traffic for is dying wife.
Not that I am suggesting any comparisons between DK and AK.
What I found diminished in this remake is an audacious adventurous spirit. Director Sudha Kongara plays it relatively safe, choosing to make the aviation war more a David-Goliath thing than an all-out battle between the haves and have-nots. This watering down of the original’s seething energy in no way makes Sarfira a decelarated experience.
The film is hugely engaging . Akshay Kumar plays the aviation magician with a mix of obstinacy and compassion. He is a uni-focussed dreamer with a penchant for rubbing his opponents the wrong way. Akshay Kumar plays Veer Mhatre with a vitality and velocity that cut across all our notions of a saturated jaded actor.
Akshay is born-again in Sarfira, his eyes radiating rage, frustration, anger and determination. This is Akshay’s best performance since Airlift (what’s with this creative affinity to airborne themes?), and a performance that needs to be evaluated per se, not in conjunction with his recent non-staters.
There are some memorable supporting actors. Sadly, Seema Biswas as Veer Mhatre’s mother is not one of them. As for Paresh Rawal, he played the aviation tycoon as a uni-dimensional villain in Soorarai Pottru. He plays the same role with even less depth to his villainy. But the every-reliable Irawati Harshe is delightful as an All India Radio journalist who takes a fancy to the headtstrong dreamer after he carries her pickles as cabin luggage.
Radhika Madan typecast as a firebrand, is no patch on Aparna Balamurli in the original . But Akshay Kumar is every bit as cogent as Suriya in the original. Their chemistry on screen, especially the way they burst into Maharashtrian dance moves , is delightful.
