Mary Kom is a positive, inspiring film. It is well-made, has superb performances by the lead cast and the direction is competent. Priyanka Chopra, who plays the five-time world amateur boxing champion from India, bites into her role with a relish you can feel. It is hard being a female actor in Hindi cinema. A role like this comes once in a lifetime and Chopra gives it her all. The surprise is Darshan Kumar, who plays Onler, Mary's supportive husband. Kumar is Onler in every sense of the word. There is lots of airbrushing - the institutionalised corruption in sports federations in India, the pathetic facilities for athletes, their regular humiliation by officials, the lack of opportunities outside the state or central government are things you will only see glimpses of in the film.
This column, however, is not about Mary Kom. It is about popular attitudes towards Indian cinema. The reviews and social media were united in trashing Chopra and the film. Every major newspaper and trade publication went into a froth about Chopra being cast as Kom. Going by the tirade that preceded and followed the film's release, a Manipuri should have been cast as Mary Kom.
These arguments keep coming up for various films. They don't hold good - for three reasons.
One, the fact that Chopra, a popular actor, was cast in the lead role gave the film a commercial heft it could never have had. If the makers had used Mary Kom herself in the lead role (as some trade sites suggest) or an unknown Manipuri actor, it might have sunk without a trace. Getting the trade to pick up a film and show it in the theatres becomes easier with popular actors. Reportedly, the film cost Rs 15 crore to make - maybe, using an unknown actor would have pushed the cost down to Rs 10 crore. Eight out of 10 films released in India lose money. That made taking a risk on this one particularly difficult since it is a biopic. As luck would have it, the film has done well at the box office and brought the initial investment back to its producers. This happened, in part, because Chopra pulled in the audiences.
If the idea was to make a popular film that told Mary Kom's story to Indians, this film has done that. However, if the idea was to make a real-life documentary - there is always space for that. You could argue that this movie is above commerce. Well if it is, then maybe someone else will make the story all over again without a popular actor and good luck to them.
Two, if we forget the commercial part and focus only on the creative, then the whole debate becomes more subjective. There cannot be rules and guidelines on who a director chooses to play a character. Thankfully, Richard Attenborough made the excellent Gandhi in the days when rabid opposition to all things creative was not so rampant in India. Otherwise, he would have been forced to cast a Gujarati man as Gandhi instead of the brilliant Ben Kingsley, who lived the part. Going by that logic, only a Sikh could have played Milkha Singh, in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, instead of the competent Farhan Akhtar or only someone from Madhya Pradesh should have played Paan Singh Tomar, instead of the talented Irrfan. This argument could go on.
Making films is a creative business and actors are trained to do stuff that is way beyond their ethnic or national identities. This insistence that only an actor from the state or country that a story comes from can play that role is, creatively speaking, regressive. It smacks of the same kind of prejudice displayed by people who throw stones at studios for making films on controversial subjects or harass authors and painters for their creative expression. There is then no difference between the educated, supposedly liberal film critic who insists that a Manipuri should have played Mary Kom and a political goon who objects to M F Husain's paintings. Both
suffer from an intellectual arrogance and intolerance that eventually leads to stifling creative expression.
Both the intolerant sides - the left liberal documentary loving film critic and the rabidly conservative, politicised film viewer - are two extreme points of view. Unfortunately they are the ones that hog the discourse. In between them is a large mass of Indians who like films such as Kai Po Che, Queen and Mary Kom. These are, loosely put, good films in a popular idiom. The solace this middle can have is that thanks to the numbers, its taste dominates the box office.
Lastly, the ideal yardstick to judge a biopic should be how true it is to the subject's life and times. To talk of Gandhi as a non-violent man without contextualising it against the times when Indians had no say in their own country and when violence was the only way the ruling English heard their voice makes no sense. It is because those times were so terribly repressive and savage, that a semi-clad man insisting on using fasting and satyagraha to achieve his ends stands out. Attenborough's film did an admirable job of contextualising why Gandhi was a once-in-a lifetime phenomenon. That is why it is a gooseflesh-inducing watch even today.
Mary Kom herself is pretty happy with her biopic. She reckons that if more people see the film and get inspired, it would have done its job. In a recent interview with Hindustan Times's Brunch, she says that as long as nothing wrong was portrayed, a bit of dramatisation, considering it is a mainstream movie, is fair. Kom then, has displayed more wisdom and tolerance than most of the trade and national media.
Twitter: @vanitakohlik
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