Chak De! India [dir. Shimit Amin]

You'll have to excuse my being some 15 years late to this game. For the longest time I had been dithering about watching Chak De! India (CKI). Mainly it was on account of catching the clip where Shah Rukh Khan's hockey coach character throws out a bunch of players introducing themselves till one of them steps up and says "India". It struck me as an intensely annoying bit of poseur patriotism, and I was not eager for a film packed with that kind of sentiment. But over the weekend I had been wondering what to put on for Movie with Mum night, and, especially since I had tested her the last time with the supremely amoral Mukundan Unni Associates, just decided to go with this as a rah-rah crowd-pleaser.

Of course, CKI has to be given a lot of leeway because it was one of the early Bollywood sports movies, and possibly the first which featured the lead guy as a coach rather than as a player. Our coach is a former player named Kabir Khan who some years ago became (in)famous for having lost a World Cup match with Pakistan (horrors!) and was promptly disgraced as a traitor. We have no clue of what he has been doing in the interim, but he promptly turns up before a panel of sneering selectors (led by  the king of sneer Anjan Srivastava) to apply as coach for the Indian Women's Hockey team. He is selected because apparently no one else wants the job. I find this a little hard to believe, because any job with a salary attached has takers in this country, and especially if it were a job that carried no expectations of performance, a lot of people would want to take it up purely as a cushy position.

Anyhoo, Coach Kabir is given a bunch of recruits to put through the drill. To establish his hardass credentials, he throws out players for joining late or daring to mention their domicile state. With a mixture of sermons and sadism he starts to shape up the team. There is no romantic interest for our coach (kudos for avoiding that cliche, though one wonders if we might have had a more rounded portrayal with the coach as a married man), so a fair amount of the running time can be spared to focus on the gallery of women that make up the team. This is a good thing since we get to see some interesting new actors, including Shilpa Shukla (BA Pass, which I should probably see now) as a super-bitch former captain who constantly rebels against the new coach. There's also one Sagarika Ghatge, shown to be engaged to a cricketer beau that sneers at her "gulli danda" game (apparently the actress later got married to an actual cricketer, oh the irony). The beau is such a one-note boor you wonder why she puts up with him even if she were a municipal office clerk instead of a national level hockey player. If you love your career, you can't let someone, especially a spouse, put you down in that fashion. Even in a populist film, they should have tried for a more layered portrayal.

If you've seen any sports movies before, you know exactly how CKI goes. Initially the team is a total mess with the players up in arms against each other and their coach. They learn little by little to tolerate and then stand together as a team. There are no surprises here. SRK's Kabir is in a little bubble of his own - he seems to have no personal life. We only see the mother (Jayashree Arora)  when he exits the family home in shame and re-enters after redemption. Where is she when he's at the training camp, in cryo-storage? Each time Kabir opens his mouth, it is to eject a homily. Even the scene where he talks about his period of disgrace carries little empathy because it's so rote. The pre-match pep talk he gives is utterly pointless, especially since his own character almost immediately disregards his words. Dangal's protagonist was also cliched like that, but the grounding of that narrative in a family setup (and the actual quality of writing) made it more acceptable.

On the other hand, CKI at least moves at a brisk clip, and is relatively easy to endure even in its nearly 150 min running time. It was nice, if also funny, to see a movie from "Indian means Punjabi and Punjabi means Indian" YRF in which characters from South and North East regions of India are given a chance to thumb a nose at the Hindi-Punjabi belt.While his character could have been written a lot better and less idealistic, SRK is more restrained than in other YRF movies. Mum was pleased and I didn't have too many regrets about seeing this.