'To understand just one life you have to swallow the world,' This is not something that Ali Abbas Zafar's Bharat suggests to its audience; rather it is a confession made by the protagonist of one of the most memorable novels of all time. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was not just about what its title meant, a bunch of children born exactly at that twilit moment when India woke up to freedom. It was also an overwhelmingly larger-than-life, suitably epic and even irreverently picaresque portrait of a country and a subcontinent finding its awkward, stumbling footing after independence and partition mirrored in the alternately trivial and melodramatic domestic upheavals of its protagonist Saleem Sinai's charmed and cursed existence.
It is also everything that Bharat aspires, in its lazy, distracted way, to be but comparing Zafar's sloppily crafted film to Rushdie's magnum opus and post-modernist classic, or even to the more low-key Korean film An Ode To My Father, does not make sense, really. Even without the somewhat unreasonable expectations, this is a cinematic catastrophe that deserves no pardon. Everything, from storytelling and characterisation to even a basic portrait of the changing milieu of the country with whom the titular protagonist shares his nam, is merely flimsy window dressing for the incredulous superstar on the screen to shove aside mercilessly.
That he does inevitably, merely by the dint that he is played by Salman Khan, an actor whom it is impossible to take seriously anymore, so bloated is his on-screen visage on his own self-aggrandising celebrity status. We begin with his bulking and huffing and puffing Bharat, looking hardly convincing as a gruff septuagenarian who grunts and frowns at a family of people played by refreshingly unfamiliar faces who, regrettably, have nothing to do at all in the film. How could they? This is all about him.
His story begins on a somewhat promising note, even though by now we have had enough of more genuinely tragic cinematic stories staged against the tumult of the Partition. We have seen it all now: a son swears tearfully to take care of his family moments before his father disappears forever. Still, at least in these few initial reels, Zafar's film is humming comfortably in an assured narrative direction that makes way for a full-fledged potboiler, true to the masala roots of Manmohan Desai and Manoj Kumar. But what follows instead is neither here nor there, a banal, often shoddily scripted film that jars because there is no rhythm or flow here. At one moment, there is the silliest of slapstick, at another, there is yet another blatant, misguided public service announcement.
All of it is also incredibly exasperating, rather than entertaining. At a hundred and sixty-seven minutes, Bharat plods on and on, digressing into unfunny situations and asides with badly etched caricatures and with a bunch of forgettable songs. The mediocre quality of the film's potential entertainment value and slipshod, anachronistic production values are not the only areas where the film wastes away all the talent involved. Zafar, vying vainly and amateurishly for overarching ambitions, crams in too many side players to Bharat's odyssey through many a shoddily recreated timeline and yet none of them have anything substantial to do than just throw in silly jokes for what their money's worth. There is a supporting ensemble, all right, but save for Sunil Grover's sidekick trying his valiant best to be this film's Nawazuddin Siddiqui, pretty much everyone gets shortchanged.
Veterans like Kumud Mishra, Brijendra Kala and Satish Kaushik are reduced to cartoonish roles that are either inexplicably smug or nonsensical, an unnecessarily ill-clad Disha Patani romps around for about five minutes or so, thrusting her svelte body vigorously to no alluring effect and as for Tabu's much-touted cameo, it only reminds us that an actress of her calibre has no business being in such drivel.
And then there is Katrina Kaif, probably one of the more annoying things in a film that fizzles out too early and becomes a tedious bore. In an attempt to make her Kumud as a straight-up and sassy woman, both Zafar and Kaif ham atrociously and the result is a painful, even grating heroine who is more frustrating instead of being a welcome foil to Bharat's cloying earnestness. It does not help that she is given large, badly written chunks of dialogues to mouth; the vain effort to be taken seriously as a performer is too much of a tall order for the lady.
In Rushdie's novel, the tumultuous and even doomed arc of Saleem Sinai's life is held up as a looking glass, both magical and morbid, of India's many initial promises nurtured, questioned in its forays into war, and then betrayed by the onset of the Emergency in the 1970s. Coming closer to cinema, the eponymous naive hero of Forrest Gump is carved out as a cast-iron model of incorruptible sincerity in an America that sheds a little of its innocence with every watershed cultural and political moment it witnesses. And in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, Colonel Candy's trenchantly English stiff-upper lip is tested by the increasingly complex realities of the wars that his country engages in.
In Bharat, there is no such discerning or subversive insight to be found in its hero's single-minded showboating exploits. We are dragged along uninterestedly in his flaky, ridiculous adventures as a daredevil stuntman in a circus, a heroic worker in the oil fields of Arabia, an able-bodied seaman who outwits Somalian pirates and while all these episodes might have made for a rollicking time in a more enjoyably brainless outing, the film's mock-serious pretensions weight them down. We wait for some shred of insight to be found in his decisions and motives but we get nothing, except for chest-beating displays of patriotism (as evidenced by an awfully jingoistic scene when the audience itself is roped in to rise for the national anthem) and thick-headed, self-serving machismo.
What is he then? As embodied by Khan's embarrassingly awkward performance that now fails to rouse any sense of fanfare, let alone convince, he is, at the most, full of the same superstar bilge that we, as a nation, end up nevertheless worshipping to no end. In one of the stray clever moments in the film, we are told that the 1990s saw the birth of not one but three superstars. That is all that we can glean from a film this randomly and carelessly directed, written and staged: we are forced, time and again, to swallow superstars, not characters or believable people. This time, it chokes us to death by boredom.
My Rating: 1 Star Out Of 5
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