Two years back when I interviewed Rakeysh Om-prakash Mehra for a TV channel he had just about started work on Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. He wouldn’t reveal much except to say “wait and see”. I was unsure of what the film on a legendary athlete, still alive, would turn out to be.
Biopics are so difficult to make. Behind the façade of normalcy, most newsworthy people lead complex lives that are not so easy to adapt to cinema.
In a documentary, if just the facts are crafted cleverly they make an impact. In a film for the masses, various sensibilities have to be acknowledged to make it entertaining. This should happen without compromising on the essential truthfulness of the story, which is always challenging. Within the genre of biopics, those based on sports personalities are even more difficult not just because so much about them is so extensively documented, but also because the scale of their exploits are so difficult to capture. Imagine trying to recreate the atmosphere of an Olympics final!
Though long-drawn, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag is engaging because it brings to light so many not-so-well-known facets about the athlete and is told passionately by Rakeysh. To lift the film further, Farhan Akhtar breathes life into his role: he doesn’t ‘act’, he has dissolved himself into the character. Prasoon Joshi, self-confessedly not a sports buff, ‘humanises’ the athlete in a screenplay/dialogues that moves, angers, inspires by turn. To pick on certain events of a life and weave them into a script is not easy when there is so much to tell. There is however a blip in the storyline which shows Milkha going to Pakistan for the first time after partition after the 1960 Rome Olympics when in fact he had gone for the meet in Lahore before the Games the same year. A tinge of jingoism also creeps in.
I asked Prasoon about this. He admitted that creative license had been exercised in the matter. I suppose it was to finish the film on a positive, rather than a losing note for the hero given India cinema’s sensibilities. In my personal opinion, this was unnecessary. Losers in sports can yet be heroes depending on the perspective. Milkha is an iconic figure even if he came fourth at the Rome Olympics. But I am not a film reviewer and this is still a column on sports. My observations on this film are essentially for the consumption of sports lovers and my ilk. The purpose of writing this piece is to provoke greater interest in film-makers and fans about sports and sports personalities — not just fiction like say Lagaan or Chak De India which has its own great strengths, but true stories. The dramatic sweep this genre offers can make for compelling cinema. As Hollywood has shown so often (Somebody Up There Likes Me, Chariots of Fire, Ali, to name a few) they can also make the box-office jingle if the film is well-made.
In India, we have been disdainful about our own sports icons simply because we have not achieved high honours internationally outside of one sport. But this does not mean they were not rich human stories to tell, as Tigmanshu Dhulia did so brilliantly with Paan Singh Tomar.
Indeed, there are outstanding sporting lives that would make for splendid biopics in the hands of sensitive directors. A few that come readily to mind are Dhyan Chand, Lala Amarnath, Keshav Jadhav, P.T. Usha, Mary Kom (on whom a film is under production I understand), Mohammed Azharuddin, Vinod Kambli, Sachin Tendulkar...not forgetting a young man from Ranchi who 10 years back looked like he would spend his lifetime as a railway ticket collector and is now regarded as the best one-day player in the world and India’s best-ever captain.