Bhaag Milkha Bhaag: Earnest effort gets carried away

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag

StarrIng: Farhan Akhtar, Yograj Singh, Sonam Kapoor, Prakash Raj

Rated: 5.5/10

Milkha Singh: The Great Indian Tragedy, screamed a newspaper headline after his famous 400m race at the Rome Olympics. Aiming for gold and being in the lead for most of the lap, the Flying Sikh suddenly looked back — and fell out of the medals pedestal. The film, too, could have won the race but loses it by a whisker. What could have been a truly inspiring story of a truly great Indian sportsperson, turns into a much too long, much too dramatised, much too song and dance version of a story inspired by a true life.

Not that the real man in question — Milkha Singh himself — is minding it. After all, Farhan Akhtar has done his best to race like him, feel like him and live life like him — whether it is while he is running for the nation and the Services, or running away from painful memories of a gory Partition which took down Milkha Singh’s entire family in blood. Indeed, Farhan’s work in this biopic by director Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra is gritty, real and well researched. His bhangra is as authentic as his racing.

But even Farhan’s hard work fails to stitch up those agonisingly prolonged 187 minutes that tick away for eternity. Really, who makes a 3-hour-7-minute movie for today’s society which collectively suffers from attention deficit disorder?

Rakyesh got too inspired and too carried away by an icon whom he sometimes saw from a distance practising on Delhi’s tracks. In his bid to play to the gallery, he forgot that Milkha’s story really did not need an over dramatisation. His traumatic childhood, his wayward youth spent in the rough and tumble of a refugee camp, his bid to become something and then his race against all odds is inspiring enough on its own. It would have been a truly great biopic if Mehra had stuck to what really happened and not added so much fiction around the fact. It was a misguided attempt to overawe Milkha’s achievements on the tracks with the life that he had led and the trauma he had suffered due to Partition.

I would have been happier spending more time with this legend on the tracks, reliving his athletic journey instead of meandering through his painful memories which, really, did not make the man the legend he is. His racing did. A good effort gone awry by needless Bollywood masala. Perhaps, Mehra can take a lesson from Tigmanshu Dhulia and the way he kept Pan Singh Tomar real to the bone, would have come in handy here. All said, the music is good, the cinematography around the races meticulous and the flashbacks artful. Yes, Mehra, like Milkha, loses it by a fraction.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 14 July, 2013