Living in its moments and surrendering in its narration

Rating: 3/10 (13 July 2013)

The Indian film industry's most loud and noisy version Bollywood has survived most of the last three decades without telling any story to its audience. The only creative aspect of Bollywood has been its lilting music which is created by those not so good looking talented singers and musicians who are left to watch beautiful( fare skinned) actresses and actors with chiseled body(Steroids) dance and lip sync over their hard work. So whenever a story does drop by in front of them they stumble and fail to narrate it in front of their audience.
'Bhaag Milkha Bhaag' is one those important true stories that needed to be told by someone other than Bollywood. With its very prejudice and narrow minded thinking it fails to liberate an inspirational personal life story beyond their myopic views.
Milkha Singh, the Indian athlete who was one of the few bright spots during the early years of independent India was like his nation lived its childhood in bloody tragedy of partition. Born in a Sikh community in pre-partition Multan, Milkha survived the partition with his elder sister along with her abusive husband.
Milkha goes on to survive the hard ships in the refugee camp in new born India by hook or crook. His persona comes off as lively and mischievous. In a very prolonged flashback we are shown his small town love affair and his tryst with the law. The director uses these sequences to insert the usual Bollywood machismo with girls shying from kisses & hugs along with tons of humorous sequences that are inconsequential to the storyline.
All these flashbacks are narrated to the secretary of Prime Minister Nehru during his journey by train to Chandigarh to meet Milkha Singh personally at the behest of Mr. Nehru. He is meeting Milkha to convince him to go to Pakistan for the Indo-Pak friendship games to be held in Lahore. He is accompanied by Milkha's athletic Coach in the Army and his current Indian national team coach who are trying to narrate Milkha's reason for not visiting Pakistan.
His refusal is due to his childhood traumas based in Multan i.e. now in Pakistan. He watched his father's head being chopped by Islamic fanatics after his father forced him to run away from the massacre. He does not feel any strain of friendship towards the neighboring state.
While the narration is about his refusal to go to Pakistan, there is no reference to it for over two hours into the movie until the Secretary himself stops the coaches in between to make them aware of his and audiences dilemma that what has been narrated has very little to do with Mr. Milkha Singh's refusal to head to Pakistan.
Throughout the narration we see Milkha join the Indian Army and dance with his colleagues in the dormitory, he grows up being a small time burglar and falls in love with the village beauty and sing and dream and then when he goes to Melbourne Olympics, he falls for a Blonde Australian and they sing and dance. By this time the murmurs and the desperation inside the movie theater is palpable as it is already over two hours. When the movie finally reaches its climax after over 180 minutes we witness a fleeting moment of a real historical sports movie with a race in Lahore that include Asian Champion Abdul Khaliq. The interjecting images of the race watched by Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan (who confers Milkha with the title 'Flying Sikh') and listened around India through Radio it is an easy win for Milkha but an important personal win. And the moment passes away as all the side characters begin to do Bhangra dance for the 100th times as they did for many other inconsequential sequences and occasions.
But nothing less is expected from Bollywood makers who are diagnosed with narrative mood swings that could be compared to a bi-polar person. They never stay in the moment of a storyline and try to squeeze out every existing emotion one way or the other.
Apart from the sharply written character of Milkha i.e. comparable to his sharply chiseled body none of the characters hold together for more than few minutes. They are either left praising Milkha or being jealous or falling head over heels to fall in love with him. Pakistani athletes are characterized as they way Indians feel they would behave with flaring nostrils and deep disdain for anything Indian (may be Abdul Khaliq did act arrogantly in front of Milkha).
But it has to do with some deep rooted feeling for white blonde among the film makers, for the way they portrayed Milkha's two love stories. While his village love is shown in a very asexual manner, where when the couple goes away for privacy they make childish gestures of love towards each other alone, but with the Australian it is filled with sex and booze from first night. May be they do go far off from village to make out, but for Bollywood to show intimacy it is easy way round to hook up with a blonde white woman.
Such views and forced dramatization of a very personal story discourages the narrative of the film to go along coherently. Unfortunately Bollywood manages to bring down the story of a national hero to its knees and successfully fares well where every other forgettable Bollywood movies fare; in its moments. In moments during Milkha racing from the pains of running bare feet to running for life, 'Bhaag Milkha Bhaag' finds its footing that are rare and too few in myriad of drama and Bhangra.