As the end credits of Sarfira roll, a bunch of numbers show up on screen. In the first two years of its operations, Air Deccan flew as many as 25 million first-time flyers. At its peak, it made sure that 25,000 passengers reached their destinations every day, from 67 airports across the country. India’s first low-cost airline that revolutionised air travel and made it accessible to all, went where no one had ever gone before — offering tickets for as low as Re 1. The journey towards achieving this million-dollar idea, from the vision and passion of G.R. Gopinath, makes for a riveting story, something which the armed forces man-turned-entrepreneur detailed in his book, Simplify: A Deccan Odyssey.
Four years ago, this story found its way to the screen in the form of the Tamil film Soorarai Pottru. With Suriya playing a character based on Gopinath, the Sudha Kongara directorial — which translates to ‘Praise the Brave’ — won five National Awards. Despite its overdramatic tone and filmi treatment, viewers were drawn to the honesty that lay at its filmmaking heart. Suriya was stellar, with the superstar-actor being in service of the story rather than the other way round.
In Sarfira, the official adaptation of Soorarai Pottru, with Kongara returning to direct with a significant part of her original team and Suriya pitching in as co-producer, the story remains the same — with most frames and feelings, moods and moments, scenes and subplots being a loyal copy-paste — but the film dials up its leading man several notches. It has, after all, Akshay Kumar whose social-saviour screen avatar has seen him do everything from build toilets and manufacture sanitary napkins to airlift distressed countrymen stuck in war-torn lands and rescue workers gasping for breath in waterlogged mines. Kumar’s screen reputation precedes him, giving us a 155-minute watch which seems to be more in service of the superstar in the middle rather than the other way round.
Which is a missed opportunity because Sarfira — meaning kooky, but in a good way — has everything to make for compelling cinema: the empathy-driven story of the Everyman aspiring to improve his lot in life, a man with an idea born out of emotion but tempered with practicality and a host of David vs Goliath moments which will make you cheer for an underdog who seems a representation of you in more ways than one.
Unlike Soorarai Pottru, Sarfira is unfortunately not able to hit the sweet spot. For a certain wide-eyed wonder and the honesty of first-time filmmaking seems to be missing in Kongara’s sophomore treatment of the same material.
The beats are the same, but there is quite a bit lost in translation. Suriya’s Nedumaaran becomes Akshay’s Vir Mhatre, a man from a Maharashtrian village, who dreams big enough to be labelled ‘crazy’. His one big idea? To make the poorest of the poor soar, enabling them to buy a plane ticket, till then considered only the domain of the rich. For that, Vir has to contend with naysayers, financial institutions who turn him away when he is only halfway through his business pitch and a major hurdle in the form of casteist business magnate Paresh Goswami — Paresh Rawal reprises his role from the original — whose monopoly of the Indian aviation business makes him pull out every dirty trick in the book to foil Vir’s plans. Red-tapeism, corruption, and bureaucracy are, of course, the other predictable impediments in Vir’s quest, which, at some point, is dismissed by someone in the film as “Aasmaan mein sabzi mandi bana na”.
But what works for Sarfira is that it is never boring. There is something or the other always happening in Vir’s world — with him as the omnipresent central axis — but every problem is cranked up several notches to the point of high melodrama, accompanied by an almost deafening background score, which tries hard to accentuate every emotion playing out, instead of letting the audience feel it organically. The film’s female lead — like Aparna Balamurali in the original — is spunky and ‘sarfira’, with Kongara not making the heroine an ornamental ally in the pursuit of her man’s dreams. Radhikka Madan brings in her trademark spark, but it is tough to ignore the visible age difference with Akshay, even though the film attempts to bypass it lightly through a joke at the beginning. To give the film credit, Radhikka’s Rani is an important player. But Seema Biswas, two years senior to Akshay, plays his mother in a way which makes you feel she is ready to wail out loud on cue.
What contributes to the protracted runtime are the unnecessary songs, three of which pop up even before our man has even met a venture capitalist. One pop-up we really didn’t mind? Suriya slighting from an Air Deccan plane in the film’s penultimate moments.
