Ageism in sports

In this hectic world of ours, an individual's validation in society somehow seems to hinge on how much they achieved at a young age. This truism gets even more accentuated in the world of spectator sports where one is basically considered a fossil for still being a professional after 35. This is why Gowtam Tinnanuri's Jersey is a timely reminder that age is just a number, even in the cutthroat world of sports.

This Telugu film is a fictional story of Ranji cricketer Arjun (Nani in sensational form) who gives up the sport in his mid-20s and wields the bat again only in his mid-30s because he wants his son to idolise him. Set mostly in the 1990s, this surprisingly tender film will tug at your heartstrings.

Every Indian movie with a sports theme follows the same rah-rah template of the underdog climbing to the top despite numerous obstacles. Tinnanuri has turned this trope upside down by giving the audience all the satisfaction attached to such stories but with a twist straight out of Million Dollar Baby. The Clint Eastwood movie is possibly the best sports movie I have ever watched as the latter half of it deals with the trauma attached to boxing and yet it sent a rush of blood to my head.

When Arjun returns to the field after a decade, with the baggage of a nagging wife (Shraddha Srinath) and a needy eight-year-old son (Ronit Kamra), the movie finds its firmest footing. When his former coach (a genial Sathyaraj) asks him to play a charity match against New Zealand, Arjun gets his mojo back. Finding his authoritative stroke play still intact, he wants to achieve the unthinkable: a place in the Indian cricket team.

Without caring a whit about the opprobrium and embarrassment attached to his aim, Arjun starts from scratch to earn a place in the Hyderabad Ranji team. His purple patch during the season would springboard him into the good books of national selectors. Despite the matches shown in a predictable format, there's still dramatic tension in the way Tinnanuri makes the proceedings unfold on the field. No sane person can feel jaded even though the outcome of the matches is bloomingly obvious.

A still from Jersey

However, calling Jersey a sports film will be as frivolous as saying Citizen Kane was about a newspaper owner. The scenes involving Nani and Shraddha oscillate between undying love and agony, while the sequences between the father and the son are both touching and comical. There's a beautifully crafted scene where the son lies to his mother to save the father from her ire. Another moment that stayed with me well after the movie ended is when Nani rides his bike to a railway station in Shamshabad and hurries to an empty platform to yell his lungs out to convey his excitement on his Ranji selection.

Sanu Varghese's cinematography is executed with bravura and stuns with nacreous shadows cast on the cricket ground. Anirudh Ravichander's superlative music and background score bind the movie's disparate episodes and flashbacks into a continuous, pulsing threnody. This is arguably his best album to date — one that keeps growing on you. 

Tinnanuri has showed maturity in his second outing and made something far more engaging than his debut feature, Malli Raava. His script is not bent to suit what Telugu-speaking filmgoers are typically presumed to want for their moral and emotional comfort. 

There's a beautiful joke in the film about India in 1996 when a lawyer says that no one can think their job is secure at a time when the country has had three prime ministers within a year's time.

Of course, the beating heart of this genuinely powerful film is Nani who gives the performance of his life with the disposition of someone who keeps going into the dark corners of the human psyche. Perhaps that's what keeps a sportsman going. It's hard to make a Telugu film that doesn't tick the commercial boxes, and maybe that's why this is the best Indian movie — after Iqbal and Lagaan — on the gentleman's sport.

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