May 29, 2016 12:18 PM
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‘Sarbjit’, based on the story of a man incarcerated in a Pakistani jail for over two decades, while his sister fought a dogged battle for his release, opts for high-pitched saccharine-laden melodrama: the star is equally high-pitched, leaving the actor to bring up the rear.
Sarbjit’s story has been well-documented. He lived with his family—old father, wife Sukh( Chaddha), and fiercely loyal sister Dalbir( Rai) in a Punjab village close to the Indo-Pak border. He strayed over the line one night, and was nabbed by the Pakistani patrol. That’s when his ordeal started—thrown in a box for months, limbs contorted, hung upside down and flayed till bloody, till he was forced into a false confession, and jailed.
The devastated Dalbir, ever protective about her ‘bhai’, takes up cudgels on his behalf. And she keeps going through the long and hard grind: her appeals to officials on either side of the border fall mostly on deaf ears, with only a few light-in-the-tunnel moments.(Watch Aishwarya Rai, Randeep Hooda starrer Sarbjit leaves viewers emotional on Day One) There is heft in the story.
The horror of a human forced to suffer physical and mental torture, and used as a political pawn between India and Pakistan and their see-sawing relations, is wrenching. The family is caught in a terrible cleft, neither able to forget, nor properly mourn. But the treatment is cloying and sentimental, and manipulates you into weeping without actually feeling. A real-life tale which is inherently so full of drama and heart-break has no need to be artificially revved up. But mainstream Bollywood doesn’t know any other way to do things. ‘Sarabjit’ should have been called ‘Dalbir’, because it is Aishwarya doing all the heavy-lifting, but to distressing little impact. -
