About Dangal

Bollywood's trend of adapting the lives of popular sporting heroes to the screen continues. In 2016, M S Dhoni and Azharuddin's lives were portrayed on screen. While these two movies received only modest response, the true winner was 'Dangal', the biopic of wrestler Mahavir Singh Phogat. While Phogat himself was a wrestler, the story is about his ambition to win an international gold medal (for the country) through his daughters.

I enjoyed the movie. Unlike most times when I have watched Indian movies, I didn't feel the urge to scream or hit my head against the wall. Of course, there were some problems with the depiction. Some of the more serious issues have been identified and critiqued.

Here, I will talk about some other issues that I found in the film.

Phogat's elder daughter Geeta is sent off to the national training camp and loses her path a little. The film links a slump in her performance levels to her interest in being more fashionable. As Geeta's hair grows and she starts becoming more fashionable, she starts losing big games.

When Geeta, who had rebelled against her father, comes back to the loving father's stable, she once again cuts her hair off. Her performance improves and viola! She win the gold medal.

We can see that the filmmakers tried to establish a relationship between the two. This was totally unnecessary. Serena Williams has long been the best in tennis. She is also known for her style statements and her fashionable outfits. The latter had no impact on the former. It is unfortunate that the film tries to portray sportswomen who try to 'look good' as not being serious about sports. To play sports, does one have to look 'masculine'?

Here is a photo of Geeta Phogat (the real one) when she won the gold medal.

Her long hair did not prevent her from winning the gold.

Another issue I had with the film was that it felt the need to 'dramatise' the way Geeta clinched the gold medal. In the movie, Geeta is trailing by four points and in the dying moments of the match, she does an incredible 'rainbow flip' to win by a point! In reality however, this was not the case. When Geeta already won gold, was there a need to exaggerate or embellish the win further?

Of course, in adaptations, artistic license is allowed. The fact that the national coach was made a pantomime villain is a somewhat distasteful, but acceptable method of using artistic license. But by exaggerating the way she won the gold, the message that comes across is that Geeta's win wasn't exciting enough.

To look at how such moments could be handled, one needs to look at 'Raging Bull'. In a pivotal moment in La Motta's career, he faces off against Sugar Ray Robinson. The following two videos will show how the fight occurred in real life and how it was depicted on screen.

Here too, artistic license was used. But Scorsese remain's truthful to the original, deviating only ever so slightly. The importance of the fight is conveyed through the use of lighting, camera and editing. The shot that begin's at 0.43 seconds in the second video is just unbelievably well shot. I have spoken before about the usage of silence (http://amritkosaraju.blogspot.in/2015/02/on-cinema.html). It is marked here once again.