Two competing stars – the story and the lead actor Akshay Kumar – jostle for domination in Sarfira, Sudha Kongara’s remake of her own National Award-winning Soorarai Pottru. The trouble is that they pull in different directions to the detriment of a film that is also undone a tad by a singular lack of nuance.
The fictionalized biopic of Air Deccan founder G.R. Gopinath never manages to ascend to cruising altitude in its dramatization of the birth pangs of a low-cost airline launched at the turn of the millennium. Worse, Sarfira abounds in passages that drown in puddles of mush.
The much-awarded and applauded Tamil original did not shy away from delivering over-dramatic, tear-jerking punches. In the Hindi iteration, which otherwise stays true to the screenplay and surface texture of the 2020 film, the tone fluctuates way too much and the tale feels and sounds more screechy.
Too much of anything, especially melodrama that draws inspiration from real life, is inevitably counter-productive. It definitely is in Sarfira. The mission of the protagonist is noble and egalitarian. The forces inimical to him – these are people and a system that are self-serving and status quoist – have no redeeming features. And to be sure, everything that can go wrong for the crusader for equality 35,000 feet above the ground goes wrong in ways that beggar belief.
The narrative is black and white. It has no space for shades of grey. Relentlessly shrill, the characters engage in declamatory exchanges rather than taking recourse to simple, relatable communication with each other. They holler. They hector. They adopt hackneyed postures to indicate their stance with regard to the class divide that the hero is out to dismantle in a key sector of the economy.
The story is undeniably engaging. A man from an underprivileged background – he is the only son of a schoolteacher in a Maharashtra village where no train stops – battles deep-rooted prejudices and enormous hurdles in pursuit of his dream of launching an airline that would, in his own words, be an Udupi restaurant in the air.
Sarfira does not exactly soar above the clouds although Akshay Kumar plunges headlong into a role that has far more meat than many of the other roles that he has played in recent years. The hammy bits are hard to ignore, but Sarfira does have moments that allow the star to demonstrate his wares to a greater extent than he usually does.
He plays Vir Mhatre, a man of action unlike his estranged father. He leaves home after a fallout. He earns a short service commission in the Indian Air Force as a pilot officer. His mother (Seema Biswas, stepping in for Urvashi who played the role in Soorarai Pottru) pines for him and certainly not in silence. In fact, nobody does anything in silence in Sarfira.
Disgruntled with his commanding officer (R. Sharathkumar), Vir, along with two colleagues, Chaitanya “Che” Rao (Krishnakumar Balasubramanian reprising his Soorarai Pottru role) and Sam (Saurabh Goyal), quits the job and sets his plan to make flying affordable for everybody in motion.
He goes toe-to-toe with his one-time idol, Paresh Goswami (Paresh Rawal, unchanged from the Tamil original) of Jaz Airlines, a company that enjoys complete monopoly in the aviation business. A throwaway line suggests that the super-successful entrepreneur is himself from a humble background, but there isn’t much else in the script that could help the audience get a rounded notion of who the man really is.
Goswami, who, like everything else in the Sarfira script, is etched out with very broad strokes, is averse to the idea of letting common people board airplanes. In every scene that the character is in, he peddles a single idea in a multiplicity of ways – running an airline is no child’s play and high flying isn’t for the riff-raff. Vir takes it upon himself to prove him wrong.
No matter how bad things get for him, Vir has his wife, Rani Divekar (Radhikka Madan), as a sage counsellor. She owns a bakery and plans to expand its size and scope. When the chips are down and domestic discord threatens to derail their marriage, she takes the reins in her own hands.
The chemistry between Akshay Kumar and Radhikka Madan is nowhere near the self-propelling kind that Suriya and Aparna Balamurali achieved. That drags Sarfira down quite a few notches even as it scores a few points by giving the woman in the marriage the upper hand when things really matter.
But no other character is delineated quite as sharply. Akshay Kumar is the star of the show. He does not concede much ground to the supporting characters. Vir’s mother, his childhood pal Mandar (Anil Charanjeett) or Rani’s maternal uncle (Jay Upadhyay) – people who had infinitely more impact in the Tamil film – merely hover in the backdrop.
That is not to say that Sarfira deviates in any major way from Soorarai Pottru. It is a scene-to-scene rehash although the primary location is shifted from a village in Tamil Nadu and Chennai to a hamlet in Maharashtra and Mumbai.
The character names have changed accordingly – Nedumaaran Rajangam becomes Vir Jagannath Mhatre and Sundari becomes Rani – but everything else in Sarfira – sequences, situations, dialogues – is exactly the same.
One, therefore, wonders why the remake was at all necessary especially when a dubbed Hindi version of Soorarai Pottru has been available on a streaming platform for years.
One significant similarity between the two pertains to their shallow treatment of the caste angle. Both Nedumaaran in Soorarai Pottru and Vir in Sarfira express the desire to break not only the cost barrier but also the caste barrier. The film harps constantly on affordability of air travel – the plot pivots around it – but the other crucial C-word is uttered only once without creating a meaningful context for it anywhere else in the film.
If you have seen Soorarai Pottru, Sarfira will spring no surprises. If you haven’t, are an Akshay Kumar fan and do not mind overboiled, excessively stirred drama, it might be worth a trip to a multiplex near you.