Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s Maidaan is a painfully adequate film for a large part of its 181-minute runtime. But it revealed itself to me in its final 15 minutes, when the Indian football team is facing a penalty against South Korea. “They (South Korea) have converted 99% of their penalties in this tournament,” a commentator notes. The Indian goalkeeper is effectively standing on one leg. The Indian coach is coughing blood. It’s almost like the filmmaker doesn’t want to take any chances with the high stakes of the moment. One can almost imagine Sharma waltzing around a room and screaming “Obstacles! I want more conflicts!” One can practically hear what everyone in the theatre is thinking/feeling. “Will they be able to save this penalty?” I must admit I thought about it for a second too, but then the cynical side of my brain took over.
India is trailing by a goal here. It’s the 1962 Asia Cup final, and we’re nearly at the end. The leading man is at his most frail. The movie cost a reported Rs 100 crore to make. This is the point where the director delivers the catharsis to his Bollywood audience. Do you really think India will not save this penalty? Of course they will, I thought. And they did, a minute later.
One of the most disheartening things about the last decade in Hindi cinema, is how the sports film and war film have become indistinguishable. I mean, sure, obvious differences aside (like one having a sport and the other having a war), the sentiment circles around the same tricolour, dutiful politicians, broad-stroked bureaucrats, training montages, gargantuan set-pieces and an ageing Bollywood leading man – at the heart of it all – trying his hardest.
Ajay Devgn is an interesting choice to play Syed Abdul Rahim – an outsider, who was always scoffed at. Devgn of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s (when he would spell his surname as ‘Devgan’) would have gone to town with a part like this. But the Devgn of 2024 is too lazy, too bored and too much of a shell of the person he used to be, to imbue anything real into his part. What is essentially a role based on the greatest coach Indian football has ever seen, becomes another generic football manager whose only characteristics are: he smokes too much, and doles out inspirational platitudes one could find on the walls of any gym. The one scene that genuinely moved me is when Rahim returns to the Indian football association after being banished, and is seen grovelling for his job. “I know nothing else,” he tells amused bureaucrats, which could also be an admission of a once-upon-a-time fine actor, who lost his way in the last decade and half.
There’s the laughable supporting cast around Devgn – especially the ‘antagonists’ – Gajraj Rao as Roy Chowdhury, a newspaper baron who, we’re told, can dissolve governments with his stiff editorials; and Rudranil Ghosh as Shubhankar, a petty bureaucrat, who doubles up as a lackey of Roy Chowdhury’s. There’s a confrontation scene at the beginning of the film between Rahim and Roy Chowdhury that is so unsophisticated and on-the-nose, I could literally hear director Sharma instructing his writers Ritesh Shah and Siddhant Mago to ‘speed up’ the central wedge between these two characters, after which Roy Chowdhury will pick Rahim as his sworn enemy.
The portrayal of the bureaucrats, barring one sincere man (Baharul Islam), is so cartoonish, I felt embarrassed watching it. Is this the sort of dumbing down the audience needs to see to realise the institutional apathy towards football in India? Is this simplistic writing a product of far more insidious intentions, to feed the narrative of corrupt bureaucrats during the Nehruvian era (the film is set between 1952 and 1962)? Is that why filmmakers have such a free hand while portraying politicians and bureaucrats from a certain era, while excluding the rest?
Maidaan could have been interesting if the members of the football team had an arc of their own; unfortunately, all of them lie in the shadow of Rahim and his Looney Tunes adversaries. There are many familiar names from Bengal’s golden generation of footballers like P.K. Banerjee (played by rapper Chaitanya Sharma), Chuni Goswami (Amartya Ray) and Arun Ghosh (Aaman Munshi). However, not a single player exists in an orbit of their own – they’re all simply meant to reflect the greatness of Devgn’s Rahim.
The female characters in Maidaan are practically mute – Rahim’s daughter doesn’t have a single line after her first scene, one barely even registers her presence through the rest of the film. The interesting thing is the teenage version of the daughter is played by Nitanshi Goel – who broke out with her first leading role in Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies. Rahim’s wife, Saira, played by Priyamani, is either the comic relief for her less-than-adequate English-speaking skills (she says things like, “I’ve passed away in my English exam with 50%”), the nagging wife who calls football her husband’s mistress, or exists to give her husband a pep talk when he’s resigned to his fate. It’s such a painfully unidimensional way of looking at a character (let alone women) that it could make the most entertainment-loving audience look up the Bechdel test.
Lastly, nothing tells you about the lack of unique vision of a filmmaker than the music or score they’re able to draw out of A.R. Rahman. The soundtrack of Maidaan released only a few days apart from Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila, and the difference in flavour, verve is for everyone to hear. Ali, despite his own limitations as a storyteller, at least has a distinct voice. Sharma manages to bring out Rahman at his most ineffectual. None of the songs elevate a scene, nor are Sharma’s visuals particularly compelling to make use of a Rahman song in an innovative fashion.
There’s a stretch in the final game, when cinematographers Tushar Kanti Ray and Fyodor Lyass dive around with the camera to showcase the point-of-view of a player slide-tackling their opponent. It’s an incredible way to visualise football scenes in a Hindi sports film, but unfortunately it’s too little too late. Much like the administrators’ concerns with raising the level of Indian football.
Maidaan is an exhibition in how safe, banal the Bollywood sports movie has become.
