How can any self-respecting son of Bharat - especially one named after the country - tolerate this attempt to sell out “Hind Ration Store”? You can go crazy ping-ponging between the use of the film’s title as the name of a man, and as the name of a nation. The man is literally hung from a noose, and when you see the name of the shop, you see why. (It’s possibly another reason the cow is a national metaphor.) Take the early scene, set in 2010, where Bharat meets a broker who wants him to sell his small shop to developers with “foreign” interests. With songs and colour and score (Julius Packiam) and emotions that can be picked up by the outer galaxies, our mainstream format is practically an udder for milking tears. Even with no holds barred, a South Korean melodrama is still “tasteful” (or “Western”) enough to make us sense the dissonance between form and content. The problem isn’t the source, which is so blatantly manipulative it practically cries out for an Indian remake. But the grand unifying idea of Bharat the Man Forrest Gump -ing his way through milestones of Bharat the Nation never comes together. Its screenplay is some sort of tour through the highlights of our country’s history, starting with the Partition. Bharat is an official adaptation, and it follows this format faithfully, right down to the iffy, wrinkly makeup.
The scene with the anthem exists in the 2014 South Korean melodrama Ode to My Father, whose screenplay begins in the present day - with an aged protagonist (the wrinkly makeup is iffy) - and keeps dipping into events from the past.
#SALMAN KHAN IN BHARAT MOVIE MOVIE#
Bharat is the kind of film you’d expect Akshay Kumar to make.Īlso Read: Bharat Movie Review: Sweep And Swagger But Not Enough Soul At one point, Bharat launches into the national anthem in its entirety and some of the people around me began to stand up. The film opens with a dedication “to all the fathers who are our heroes… and all the mothers who are our superheroes.” The latter could be Mother India. Bharat takes everything in its sweep, and tops it with a big, fat dose of patriotism. Maybe even the spread of malls and live-in relationships. The unemployment crisis documented in popular films like Mere Apne. Ties with the former USSR (or perhaps the Great Russian Circus that comes to Delhi is more of a Raj Kapoor nod, with a young Amitabh Bachchan in the audience picking up a career tip or two). The country’s burgeoning soft power (and not just the odd Raj Kapoor film being celebrated in the former USSR).
Even in Africa, there’s apparently no resisting the… naach -Ghana. It’s a supremely silly scene (and not the good kind of silly, like the ship’s captain, played by Satish Kaushik, speaking in a gibberish tongue), but it’s there for a reason: to demonstrate Bharat’s (i.e. Learning that the pirates are Amitabh Bachchan fans, he begins to dance to a medley of Bachchan hits - and the pirates join in. Pleading doesn’t help, so Bharat does the next best thing. The pirates are soon on board, and they want the stuff theatre owners hope to make a lot of with an Eid-release Salman Khan starrer. The crew turns on the water cannons, but nothing works. Before you can say Captain Phillips, they are attacked by Somali pirates. Well into the second half of Bharat, the eponymous protagonist ( Salman Khan, at his muscliest) finds himself on a merchant navy vessel.