While Suriya’s abilities as a performer are unquestionable, there’s a hint of eliteness in his persona that takes away the underdog charm of the role.
Published Jul 14, 2024 | 5:33 PM ⚊ Updated Jul 14, 2024 | 5:58 PM
Suriya in 'Soorarai Pottru'; Akshay Kumar in 'Sarfira'. (X)
“If you recall the memories when cinema had cast a spell on you, it would’ve been more likely in a theatre over a home theatre,” a filmmaker famously quoted during the COVID-19 lockdown, when the industry was gripped by the fear of theatres being a thing of past.
When asked about the necessity to remake a widely watched OTT release, Soorarai Pottru (2020) in Hindi, Sudha Kongara said something similar. “My only condition for the remake was that it had to be released in theatres. It’s a story I wanted to tell for a big-screen audience.”
She debated how only 2% of a privileged population has watched the original and sensed a need to take the story beyond them. For the unversed, Soorarai Pottru (and its Hindi remake, Sarfira) is a highly fictionalised biopic of GR Gopinath, the founder of Air Deccan, who made low-cost flying, a reality for the masses.
The writer of this piece did like Soorarai Pottru at the time of its release but didn’t drool over it, like the majority of the digital audience. Having watched the Tamil version four years ago, a viewing of Sarfira was a timely opportunity to look at the same story with a fresh pair of lenses minus the baggage of the original.
Sarfira will always be an important film for all of us! @akshaykumar Sir Thank you for choosing Sarfira as your 150th film & you’ve made Veer come alive so beautifully @Sudha_Kongara you’ve lived this dream for so many years happy our film is in theatres now #RadhikkaMadan is… pic.twitter.com/LzAwf7h4pZ
— Suriya Sivakumar (@Suriya_offl) July 12, 2024
Make no mistake, Sarfira is a near frame-to-frame remake of Soorarai Pottru. The backdrop shifts from Madurai to a village near Maharashtra’s Jarandeshwar. The makers themselves take a dig at the age gap between its lead stars—Akshay Kumar and Radhika Madan—denying that liberty to the audience.
In contrast to Suriya’s withdrawn, sophisticated portrayal of Nedumaaran, Akshay Kumar liberates Vir Jagannath Mhatre from such shackles and plays a small-town dreamer with an uninhibited flamboyance. There’s more wit and body language at play, matching step to step with Radhika Madan’s spunky, Rani.
Akshay Kumar and Radhika Madan’s chemistry is livelier—it is more obvious that Vir and Rani are different versions of one another. Though the scale of their ambitions may vary, they think alike, are ‘moo phat’ (outspoken), are driven by instinct, and remain unaffected by the storms in their paths.
Sarfira is a reminder that you can stay true to the spirit and the realism of a story and still play around with the source material (GR Gopinath’s book, Simply Fly) to lend it a mainstream appeal. Take away its biopic label—the film is a story about a hero, who outsmarts all odds, to fulfill his dream with a supportive wife.
Continuing Tamil filmmakers’ fetish to make a villain out of corporates and capitalists, Sudha Kongara gives us a classist, dignified baddie through Paresh Goswami. As a character, he precisely represents the snobbishness of the elite, who go full throttle to suppress any idea threatening their authority.
The idea of a biopic wrapped within the structure of a mass film comes through more effectively in Sarfira—and a major reason for that is Akshay Kumar’s casting. While Suriya’s abilities as a performer are unquestionable, there’s a hint of eliteness in his persona that takes away the underdog charm of the role.
Akshay Kumar’s presence helps Sudha Kongara find the elusive realism in star-driven cinema—he has the aura of a larger-than-life star and can shift to being a grounded performer, as per the needs of a scene. However, it must be said that Bommi’s resilience shone through in Soorarai Pottru better than Rani in Sarfira.
That women need to have an identity of their own and live with self-respect—has been a constant theme in Sudha’s filmography. Through Sarfira, she reminds us that men can be victims of patriarchy, too and they needn’t always carry the burden of being breadwinners in a family—even if the world around them thinks otherwise.
Like Soorarai Pottru, Sarfira maintains emotional control with father-son angst that, while not as intense as the original (possibly due to the setting), is effective. Vir and Rani’s marriage, devoid of ego and focused on unity, is a refreshing aspect.
Akshay Kumar and Suriya on the sets of ‘Sarfira’. (Instagram)
Sudha Kongara drives home the essence of Vir’s ambition through smart metaphors. In a chat with a venture capitalist, while explaining his idea of a low-budget airline, Vir calls Deccan Air an “Udti Udupi hotel.” The cargo planes used for their journeys are referred to as “Aeroplane ki Maruti 800.”
The storyteller touches upon crowdfunding (an entire village comes together to invest over ₹3 crore in Vir’s airline) even before it was a catchphrase in business circles. There’s warm early 2000s nostalgia—an era centred on pagers, the evolution of mobiles, the rise of the internet, and the slow elimination of middlemen.
The much-discussed airport sequence, where Vir doesn’t have enough money to buy a business class ticket to meet his father and pleads with his co-passengers for help, still sticks out like a sore thumb. For someone of Sudha Kongara’s merit, she could’ve easily risen above bloated melodrama to put forward her message.
While there are minor tweaks in the cultural ethos to reach out to a wider audience, the screenplay of the Tamil and Hindi versions is relatively similar. Yet there’s more precision in the storytelling with Sarfira. The treatment is slicker and the director appears to be in greater control of the proceedings.
There’s one particular editing transition that works like a dream—when the voice of a media person’s headline about the supposed death of Vir’s airline (even before it takes off) coincides with the birth of his daughter. It’s a beautiful sequence suggesting “All’s not lost yet”, through the baby and that he can be a better father, if not a worthy son.
Akshay Kumar in ‘Sarfira’. (X)
The climax provides a terrific high, tells you no dream is small or big, and how accessible, affordable airline travel is a sign of societal progress. It also gives you the ultimate satisfaction of an ordinary middle-class man breaking the glass ceiling in the aviation sector. Vir also gets a rare opportunity to return it to his nemesis and says, “The common man now has wings to fly.”
Sudha Kongara pays homage to Soorarai Pottru’s Nedumaaran by naming Vir’s commanding officer after him (R Sarathkumar plays the role) and Suriya makes his presence felt in a special cameo as an airline investor who credits Vir for making airline travel more “egalitarian.”
Paresh Rawal, Krishnakumar Balasubramaniam, and Prakash Belawadi reprise their roles from the original with ease. At the same time, the newer additions—Anil Charanjeett, Rahul Vohra, and Seema Biswas, have a sparkling presence in their screen time.
Sudha Kongara may’ve missed a trick or two by not opting for a different technical team that could’ve given a new flavour to the story. Yet, impressively enough, composer GV Prakash Kumar, in collaboration with Suhit Abhyankar and Tanishq Bagchi, comes up with a cracker of an album that boasts of rich variety.
The pick of the album is Shreya Ghoshal’s Chaawat, brimming with an infectious spirit, and is Kaattu Payale on steroids. Saindhavi is in top form with Ye Kahani—the climactic number, while the other montage songs Ye Kahani, Maar Udi, and De Taali have a folksy touch beneath their westernised orchestration.
However, GV Prakash reserves his best for the background score, which nearly acts like a well-meaning pal that stands by Vir through his thick and thin, improvising the essence of a sequence effortlessly. It’s to his credit that the emotional core of the original is preserved equally well in a remake.
Unlike Soorarai Pottru, which had to be released on OTT under exceptional circumstances, watching Sarfira on a big screen provides the right closure for a viewer. It’s not often that you get a purposeful star vehicle about the heroics of a man where the leading woman too has a well-rounded part.
(Edited S Subhakeerthana)
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