Dangal: Dhaakad hai, Dhaakad hai
Cast : Aamir Khan, Sakshi Tanwar, Fatima Sana Sheikh, Sanya Malhotra, Zaira Wasim, Suhani Bhatnagar
Rated : 9/10
When Geeta Phogat won the Women Wrestling Gold in the 55 weight category at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, women’s wrestling came to be known, somewhat. In 2016, when Aamir Khan made a movie on the Phogats, their long due stardom finally came of age. That’s because Dangal is a rare sporting movie from Bollywood where drama, song and dance does not overwhelm the reality of the true story of struggle and achievement.
With a perfectionist Aamir Khan at the helm, you would not have thought otherwise. But, Dangal has an added aura of achievement of the underdog, a simple story of woman wrestling in Haryana where the male-female ratio is shamefully shocking.
But Dangal does not drive that in forcefully. It skillfully depicts it through the incredible story of the Phogat family with Aamir playing the no-nonsense, obsessed yet vulnerable and path-breaking patriarch Mahavir Singh Phogat. So, the film works at various levels — it makes a statement about societal pitfalls, it talks of sporting gaps, it showcases the struggle of athletes and, most importantly, it serenades the coming of age of women in the most adverse of circumstances.
In short, Aamir’s Dangal wrestles on and off the mat with perfection. The long bouts that both the younger and the grown-up Geeta Phogat battles are as real as any wrestling bout you may have seen live at the Commonwealth Games. Not just that, the story that goes with the akhada centrespread is told in a simple but arresting manner. The Spartan dressing, the gentle humour, the lingo, the village ambience, the dangal talk, the regional flavour — it’s all been keenly researched and depicted with stunning and captivating realism on the screen.
That Dangal takes you through the life and times of neglected athletes like the Phogats, that it shows up how a family breaks the difficult social mould of a patriarchal society, how wrestling, like any other competitive sport, comes with an extremely difficult regimen, a lot of sacrifices and complete commitment to the mat, is a rare peep into the world of the actual state of sports in India.
Despite having Aamir as a towering personality in the film, it’s Geeta Phogat around whom the story pivots, especially when it comes to the perfectly curated wrestling bouts. Both the young Geeta, played with such becoming aggression and passion by child artiste Zaira Wasim, and the grown-up version, essayed with delightful emotional restraint by Fatima Sana Sheikh, are the centre points of the film. Not that Babita (Suhani Bhatnagar as young one and Sanya Malhotra as the grown-up) is any less. Sanya has speaking eyes and sports the ability to speak with them to maximum impact. Production notes of Dangal will tell you that the four girls went through a nine-month wrestling and gym schedule so the fights look completely in real time and that’s the best thing about the film.
Then there are the dhakad songs, Aamir’s reality bites, delectable humour embedded in the proceedings, dialogues that roar without yelling and a unique contemporariness encased in realism.
Such single-mindedness about sport is not frequent in a Bollywood movie. That’s why Dangal will make you stand up and applaud much after the National Anthem has played out in the cinema hall.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, December 25, 2016