‘Chak De, India’ is a 2007 film starring Shah Rukh Khan and about a dozen other girls in one of the most understated performances of his career. In a stubble-ridden role of the humiliated former Indian Hockey captain, Kabir Khan - now the coach of the girl's hockey team, he crosses his arms across his chest in silent dignity and allows the girls to take over the proceedings. Take for instance, the scene where he kicks Bindiya out of the team. She is taking long strides of anger in the football field and the camera is focused on her while SRK is relegated to the background. It is not about his heroism and one-upmanship over her – it is always about the girls.
I think ‘Chak De, India’, is one of the most cliché-defying Hindi movies even while it operates in the regular moorings of a sports movie genre; viz. an ensemble team of underdogs coming together to win against stronger opponents. Reasons are quite a few. Can you imagine a SRK movie without a heroine/love-interest? There are about a dozen girls in the film but no heroine. SRK sporting a stubble in a movie? A Yash Raj Film that is not a love story? The central point of a Muslim being called a traitor and needing to do always a little more than his fellow citizens to prove himself a patriot is touched upon and then the whole plot is handled so subtly that it is not brought up again while the undercurrent is always there. In the midst of this, the director veers away from glorifying the only Muslim girl in the team as a form of visual vindication.
The movie is filled with many stand-out scenes one better than the other.
Consider the scene where the girls’ team has to defeat the men’s team to get an entry to the world cup - they actually don’t win it but still win the respect of the men’s team and the selectors. That is definitely the single most moving scene in the film - the girls are to themselves, down and out and packing up to leave or something to that effect and then they notice all the boys saluting the girls with their hockey sticks after they win the match.
Take another example of the scene where that rowdy girl (Bindiya) in the group tries to compromise herself to Kabir Khan for exchange of captaincy. It is a very easy scene to be spoilt but here it is handled in a very dignified manner.
Then there is this scene where each of the girls is registering for the team. The entire scene systematically exposes the national stereotypes – when the fellow says 'telugu aur tamil mein kya farak hai', Netra Reddy coolly replies 'itna farak hai jitna bihari aur panjabi mein hai'. I am sure every South Indian would have nodded and smiled knowingly to that line. It follows up with calling the girls from North East as 'chinkis' (apne he desh mein hum mehman kaha jaate hai or something like that) and the girls from Jharkand being mistaken for 'ramleela' girls.
In a film replete with scenes that are memorable, there comes this song 'Baadal Pe Paon Hai'. It appears at a point when the entire team is on their way to the world cup in Australia. The picturisation of that song is the best visual representation in Film about the 'Enigma of Arrival'. The wonderment in the eyes of the girls as they are on their virgin voyage, the tentativeness while standing in a queue in a foreign land to pick strange food served on the buffet, the excitement in seeing places never seen before; It is something each one of us middle-class small-town folks - or may be all of us - go through in life when we travel abroad for the first time. Even as I type these lines, tears of emotion well up my eyes with the thoughts that crossed my mind when I was on my first international trip.
That one scene, being well in the flow of the narrative of the film, seamlessly detaches itself and exists in it own plane to represent something universal, thus transforming itself into one of the great Cinematic moments.
If you think that the match commentaries during the last act of the movie are downright silly and implausible, remember the commentaries in Hindi in Doordarshan during, say, the Olympic games and think again.
I think 'Chak De, India' is the best Hindi movie of 2007 and probably the best sports movie in Hindi - even ahead of Lagaan and alongside 'Jo Jeetha Wohi Sikandar'. 'Tare Zameen Par' was more decorated that year, but this is a better film. I was singularly disappointed when Shimit Amin did not win the best director award at the Filmfare Awards that year.
4.5 out of 5 Goals. (Half goal knocked off for the melodramatic background song/music that pops up frequently)
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