With a biopic on former Indian hockey captain Sandeep Singh, Ali brings freshness to an expanding sports genre by focussing on the struggle of the body.
What happens to a hockey player who can’t stand on his own two feet? Shaad Ali’s new sports film Soorma tells the story of a sportsman whose body became his biggest obstacle.
Rewind back to another time and context. Sixteen runs required off five balls. Yuvraj Singh at the crease. A matter of two sixes. What could go wrong? Well, everything. The man who once scored six sixes in an over to get 36 runs could not manage even one of those 16 runs in an IPL match this year. He faced two balls, both within his hitting arc, from Mitchell McClenaghan and didn’t score a single run. A jaded body and slower reflexes left one of India’s greatest limited-overs players, someone who defied cancer to make a comeback, a pale shadow of his former self.
“That which we think is easy today, which we take for granted, will one day become difficult”, said commentator Harsha Bhogle after the match.
Shaad Ali’s Soorma is about another sportsman from Punjab – former Indian hockey captain Sandeep Singh. One of the best-known drag-flickers in Indian hockey, Singh met a cruel, freak accident in August 2006, shortly after his Indian debut. Singh was accidentally shot when he was aboard a train on his way to join the national team for the World Cup.
In 2009, three years after he was paralysed from waist below, he led the Indian team to win the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup in Malaysia.
Sport has always been about achieving what we think is impossible, finding newer limits for the body, and then going on to breach that limit again. And that’s why endurance of the human body and spirit remains the center point of most great sports films.
In Soorma, Ali finds an incredible story of resilience against an accident of life.
Ali focuses on the paraphernalia and quintessential Bollywood tropes in a rather charming first half, even if he maintains only a cursory fidelity to the actual life of Singh. Writers Ali, Siva Ananth, and Suyash Trivedi peg Singh’s initial struggle on romance, but later return to the actual conflict – a betraying body.
When Singh finds himself on a wheelchair, humiliation kicks in. To see his family struggling to make ends meet even as they fend for him is degrading for ‘Flicker Singh’. That he can’t even wash himself is too much to take. So with the help from Hockey India, Singh leaves after a bitter feud with his supportive brother Bikramjeet Singh. During his rehabilitation period in Europe, Singh fights to win his body back.
This is where Ali, who has himself had a chequered career since his 2002 debut Saathiya, films the journey with a lot of empathy. He takes us closer to Singh’s battle with himself through a wonderfully filmed montage over Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s evocative song, Pardesiya, written by Gulzar. In the montage, Singh manages a hesitant stand first, then a limp, and finally is able to take the burden of his own weight.
Reminiscent of the famous last shot from Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-nominated Gravity (2013), Singh’s effort to stand on his two feet in a pool means the world to him. This eminent passage in a by-the-numbers film brings certain freshness to a genre that’s now been overdone.
Sports biopics are the latest fad in the Mumbai film industry. Pretty much everyone is making one. For too long, sports films were never really that important in the Bollywood scheme of things— barring Anil Ganguly’s Saaheb and Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray in mid-1980s, and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992).
In 2007, Shimit Amin’s now-cult Chak De India, another hockey film about a rag-tag team, created the contours for a genre that has now been patented by Bollywood for underdog stories– the good, bad and ugly. There has been a barrage of films on sports figures thanks to a widening economy throwing up more sports, players and stories on our screens. These films usually present their protagonists mostly in a flattering light, with individual struggles limited only to externals. Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) and M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016) were watchable films but did not portray the individual’s inner world.
What motivates these champions to get so much from within themselves? The mechanics of their physical ability is often shown, but only in passing. Soorma brings the focus back on the athlete and his body.
In his six-film long career, Ali has always had great music courtesy his collaborators. In his latest do-or-die effort, featuring moving performances, he finally earns the words of his legendary lyricist. The opening lines of the film’s title track, picturised on Singh’s comeback, go:
Piche mere andhera, aage andhi aandhi hai
Maine aisi aandhi mein, diya jalaaya hai
Roughly translated, it means, “darkness is behind me, and a storm ahead, yet I’ve lit a lamp in this storm.”
The human body chains as much as it liberates. Few people understand this more than a sportsperson. A fine addition to an overdone genre, Soorma is a remarkable tale, even if a bit imagined, of the human triumph of one such sportsperson.