I’m becoming increasingly certain about a hypothesis I’ve held for long: Hindi biopics are now a means to fuel the narcissism of Bollywood stars, directors and a nation constantly seeking validation. I can see why a mediocre Bollywood star looks at a biopic as an opportunity to do something along the lines of Tom Hardy or Christian Bale, proving their mettle as ‘actors’ by (usually) undergoing a punishing physical transformation which ends with them looking their best.
It’s always a great marketing tool and a conversation filler during interviews where one could go on about chucking sugar from their diet. It’s not far-fetched to imagine an audience so immersed in celebrating the underdog’s climactic victory that it does them the disservice of overlooking their humanity, turning them into an easy-to-consume symbol. The person and their incredible life story are hardly ever the point of a Bollywood biopic. The heady euphoria is.
Chandu Champion doesn’t see director Kabir Khan veering too far from his last few films. After the shamefully servile, 83 (2022), Khan has made another film that feels like the answer sheet of a CBSE student who memorised the entire syllabus the night before the exam and reproduced most of it diligently. The answers are mostly there, but they rarely feel insightful.
To Khan’s credit, he seems well-versed with the ways of Bollywood manipulation – he knows how to proficiently shoot a sports sequence, he knows how to amp up the melodrama during key moments and he knows how to afford his ‘star’ the requisite amount of space to act within their limitations. There’s an overall sincerity to the way he commits to the aesthetic of mainstream filmmaking like few of his colleagues can, so much that one could almost forgive him for that.
But there are also things in a Kabir Khan film that feel synthesised in a ‘blockbuster’ laboratory. The hero’s catchphrase, “Aye, hasta kayko hai?” [Why are you laughing at me?] feels Rajkumar Hirani-esque. The bald comedy usually centred around mispronounced English words feel juvenile, the ‘inspirational’ monologues (Khan is a co-writer here, with Sumit Arora and Sudipto Sarkar) took me back to my school assemblies when I would try and predict an announcement by just hearing the first two words – so banal and predictable is the phrasing.
There’s also Khan’s fixation with the tricolour and the armed forces. Khan has always been vocal about having the ‘right kind of politics’ in his films, but the manner in which he has invoked patriotism in an era when any form of dissent is enthusiastically labelled as ‘anti-national’ raises questions. Is he pandering to the very mob that decides the meaning of what it is to be a ‘patriot’ in today’s volatile times?
Chandu Champion is based on the real-life story of Murlikant Petkar, born in a village near Sangli (Maharashtra). A spirited young boy who grows up dreaming about winning a gold medal for India at the Olympics in wrestling, Murli goes on to join the army and represents India in boxing. After being grievously injured during the 1965 war, following which he slipped in and out of coma for two years, he trained as a paralympic swimmer. He participated in the 1972 Munich Olympics, where he won the gold medal. Like many sportspersons, even Petkar’s service to the nation was forgotten. Only after he applied for the Arjuna Award in 2017 was he conferred with the Padmashri the following year. It’s an incredible life story, perhaps too incredible, one that I might have dubbed ‘too contrived’ and ‘inspired by Forrest Gump’ if it wasn’t already true.
Aaryan never fully justifies the reasons behind being chosen to play Petkar, sporting a medieval haircut at the beginning of the film. The Marathi twang and speech rhythm don’t come naturally to him, as it does to Shreyas Talpade (who plays a minor role here) or Ranveer Singh in Bajirao Mastani (2015) and Simmba (2018). As the film approaches the interval point, the floppy hairdo is replaced with a crisp Aalim Hakim cut and uniform 21st century stubble. There’s no ‘truth’ to Aaryan’s appearances here, even when his character wakes up from a coma after two years. It always feels like Aaryan is play-acting the suffering, instead of actually going through hell. There’s an early wrestling scene where Aaryan is seen in a langot (loincloth) where, to paraphrase something Gary Oldman once said about parts with considerable make-up and costume, the langot seems to be wearing him instead.
Aaryan is not the most gifted star – he doesn’t have the swagger or affability to make us overlook the physical sameness of his characters. Where Aaryan the star takes over a character, instead of the other way round. The toothy smile, the gargling speech, the eagerness to find acceptance – Aaryan’s Petkar is a hard character to immerse yourself in if you haven’t fully bought into Aaryan’s potential as an actor.
Entire characters are omitted — for example, Petkar’s wife, who is never mentioned in the film [except in text at the end of the film]. His parents and brother swoop in and out whenever convenient. Vijay Raaz, who plays Tiger Ali, Petkar’s coach, is one of the strongest actors out there to merely be seated in the audience to shed tears on behalf of the star. I thought Raaz was significantly more effective in the Diljit Dosanjh-starrer, Soorma – a similarly bland film on a brilliant real-life story.
At 144 minutes, Chandu Champion feels duller the longer it goes on; not having the heart or confidence to subvert sports movie staples, such as the training montage. Kabir Khan has shot three training montages here which, despite my love for these sequences, feel like a lot. The monologues delivered by Aaryan or Raaz to motivate him before a key battle felt like nails on a chalkboard by the end. I think I mentally checked out by the time the proceedings reached Munich.
There’s something interesting director Anurag Kashyap said in a recent interview about the much-publicised ‘India’s moment’ at Cannes this year. He ended his rant by saying how our nation doesn’t support such initiatives and only likes to take credit for it.
These wins are despite an infrastructure that kills dreams and livelihoods on a daily basis, not because of them. Kabir Khan’s Chandu Champion feels like that self-serving bureaucrat who is nowhere to be found for years leading up to the Olympics, but is seated front and centre during the victory lap after a medal comes home. They don’t care about the critical gaps in our systems, they’re only here for the catharsis and credit offered by these success stories. And if the audience at my screening – who broke into an impromptu applause in the end – is anything to go by, so were they.
