Sarbjit: Call it Dalbir not Sarbjit

Cast: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Randeep Hooda, Richa Chadda, Darshan Kumaar

Rated: 5/10

The story of Sarbjit Singh Aitwal, the real one, started in 1990 when he accidentally crossed the unwired Indo-Pak border and ended in 2013 with his body being brought back from the Kot Lakhpat Jail when his release was just a few days short in 2013.

Director Omung Kumar puts this long, torturous and tragic journey of a border village family into a two-hour overly dramatic, emotional melodrama at the centre of which is notSarbjit the man himself but his crusader sister Dalbir Kaur.

Though Sarbjit’s saga in real life was powered more by his sister than him, the choice becomes an errant path in the film. It becomes one of the prominent problems that the film faces but the bigger one is the casting of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as Dalbir Kaur. Not that she is a bad actor but she was never made for this role and that would have stared for a mile much before the film was scripted.

Dalbir is not at all like Ms Bachchan despite the de-glamourised presence of the beauty queen and all the nude make-up, wide eyed pain and a high pitch campaign to get her brother back from the jaws of certain death.

The real Dalbir was, and is, indeed a doughty fighter now engaged in getting as many Pakistani prisoners out of Indian jails as Indians from Pakistani jails. However, she does not look like or behave like or constantly yell like Ms Bachchan does in Sarbjit. So, it’s a total mismatch which, very strangely neither Omung Kumar nor the entire Bachchan parivar foresaw.

In fact, come to think of it, Richa Chadda who plays Sarabjit’s silently mourning wife with a much more powerful silence, would have been a better choice as Dalbir. As the wife, Sukh, she is no less and gathers more silent applause than the loud claps sought by Aishwarya’s high-octane play-to-the-gallery performance.

Much like the shrilly falsetto Aishwarya hit in Jazbaa, in this one too she takes off in an instant, not giving the audience even a moment to adjust to her high volume, specially in an environment that is so overtly tragic and worrisome that it needed not immense hyperactivity but a big amount of under pitched mourning. In Jazbaa, Aishwarya made news for coming back to the screen as a stunner after being trolled on social media networks for more than a year for her postnatal fat.

In this one, there’s not even that mission to save her from being trolled, this time for her performance which smacks of a lot of hard work but very little homework.

A lot on Aish erroneously, much like Sarabjit. The hero of the film was supposed to be Sarabjit, the man who took it all for 23 years and finally lost the battle to a planned cold blooded murder. If Aish was a terriblefaux pas as a Punjabi belle, then Randeep Hooda is a more than perfect fit. His accent, his bhasha,his diction are all correct. Sadly, his role in the film is rather stymied by spurts of presence but in the limitations imposed upon him, he does so much more than Aish and others that he manages to save the film from a hurtle every time he enters the frame. His make-up, his unkemptness, his filthiness, everything has been handled with care. Top this with his striking acting ability and his capability to get under the skin of Sarabjit’s character and situation is almost dazzling in a perverse kind of way.

Amid all this clash of characterisation, a word or more should be spared for the good points of the film, one of them being the art direction by Omung’s wife. The recreation of the Kot Lakhpat jail, the sepia shades and the hazy dinginess around Sarabjit’s isolation cell, the realness that she recreates is stunning.

Other than that, the real story of the real Sarabjit and his sister’s unrelenting campaign needed no added drama. Had it been understudied, it would have been more stunning, more shocking, more arresting than what Omung conjures up. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 22 May, 2016