Especially so, since we have already also been told what happened to his family. The film has the slaughter scene come in way too late and by then we already know the story and what has happened to Milkha since we have seen him come alone to India, live in the refugee camps, etc post Partition. But the film’s biggest failing is us not feeling that empathy and horror at the cold-blooded killing of Milkha’s family, that he as a ten year old had to experience. The attempts to justify Milkha’s underperformance at Melbourne and Rome appear naive. And while one agrees the filmmaker should uses all the cinematic tools he can to make for an engaging and accessible film, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, sadly ends up many a time in stereotypical ‘filmi’ territory everywhere right from the beginning with Milka looking around the stadium at Rome, going on to his banging into the heroine making her drop her water, the so-called cute romance, his sporting adversaries behaving like bad Bollywood villains etc, etc, etc. But the film goes a step further to make it as Bollywood friendly as it can. the raw material of Milkha’s life it had at its disposal is riveting. A device of a flashback beginning from a character’s POV, ends up being a total neutral telling of the story with several scenes where the ‘storyteller’ is nowhere in the picture and what’s more here we have a flashback within flashback within this neutral narrative flow!Įven then, all could have still worked brilliantly, had the film treated the story and these scenes well. This is one bane in Indian cinema for years now. And even here it takes several scenes before he does come across Milkha for the first time. Really, all he had to say was it was the Partition of India and the slaughter of Milkha’s family that continues to traumatise him, but no, he begins by saying that he remembered the first time he met Milka. And then when Milkha refuses to go to Pakistan for the Goodwill Games, Pavan Malhotra tells KK Raina (and us) the reason for Milkha’s refusal. One knows that one is in for heavy viewing when right from the beginning, Milkha’s coming 4th at Rome is given a ‘justifiable’ but totally unbelievable psychological slant. Repetitive and long stretched scenes and inadequate fleshing of characters make the film sluggish, typical and even disengaging in many places. And it is not merely the filmmaking, or the editing (they do their part), but more importantly, it’s the writing which lets down the film.
#FILM BHAAG MILKHA BHAAG PLUS#
It is something that does not lend itself to its running time of three hours plus as the film tries desperately to make itself an epic. At the same time, however, this very focus of the film proves to somewhat be its undoing as well. For me, I would still take it more as a triumph of the central character on a psychological level over everything else and there I have to side with the film and its maker. While some have labelled the film, helmed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, conveniently jingoistic as it involves an Indo-Pak race, which, of course, sees Milkha run as if it was his last race, I, for one, had no issues with this. We saw this in The Aviator, where Martin Scorsese focussed on Howard Hughes’ obsessive and stubborn nature ending with the successful test flight of the Hercules, Hitchcock is centred around the troubles and tribulations, particularly off screen during the making of one of Hitchcock’s most popular films, Psycho, and now Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, focuses not so much on his Rome 1960 run or some other major achievement but a race which meant a lot more personally to the ‘Flying Sikh’ – the Indo-Pak goodwill games which saw Milkha finally come to terms with the slaughter of his family during the horror of the Partition. Consequently, the film ends on a rousing high elevating the character further in our eyes. Most bio-pics these days pick up one aspect or one chapter of its lead character and make him or her overcome their personal demons connected to that aspect of their life.
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