The Real Champs?:
The Spanish film Campeones (2018), directed and co-written by Javier Fesser, was based on a true story of a team in Valencia, made up of people with intellectual disabilities. That film inspired Bobby Farrelly’s Champions (2023), and now finds its way to India, as Sitaare Zameen Par. The film, directed by RS Prasanna has been cut to fit its lead star Aamir Khan, whose saviour complex resulted in films like Taare Zameen Par, Dangal and Lal Singh Chaddha, in which he played a hero, who not just helps characters in the films to realise their potential, but underlines the message for audiences to comprehend.
This approach worked particularly well for Taare Zameen Par, which Khan also directed, and made parents and teachers understand dyslexia. Sitaare Zameen Par carries the thought further by having the protagonist interact not with one maladjusted kid, but with a team of young men with autism and Down’s syndrome.
Khan plays Gulshan, a basketball coach with more complexes that he knows what to do with. His short stature bothers him, his father’s abandonment has left a mental scar so that he avoids fatherhood; his marriage to Suneeta (Genelia Deshmukh) is falling apart when he is suspended from his job for hitting a senior, and arrested for drunk driving. The judge gives him the punishment of community service—to coach a team of intellectually backward teens. His calling them “pagal” results in a fine too.
He walks into the institution, run by a benevolent Sardar (Gurpal Singh), who gives him gentle sermons about how everybody’s idea of normal is different. Flummoxed when faced with an energetic, but uncontrollable group of players, Gulshan gradually comes to understand how to work with them and create a winning team. In the process, he is transformed too.
The team, made up of well-cast newbie actors, have their quirks—they are unable to follow instructions and have a marked lack of respect for the coach, till he earns their affection and trust. The film’s message of inclusivity is undoubtedly noble, but the players are also reduced to overcute, excitable comedians. The actual challenges of having a specially-abled child are ignored to create moments of slapstick comedy. You are told how wonderful and productive these young people are, but despite their outward differences in appearance, speech and background, their purpose seems to be to collectively knock some sense into the head of the cynical Gulshan.
While his interactions with the boisterous team — are genuinely funny, as individuals they occasionally border on caricature (particularly the sole female player, Golu, played with sass by Simran Mangeshkar). They are portrayed as lovable eccentrics, their stories pushed to the back in favor of Gulshan’s self-discovery and redemption. In the foreign films, the lives of the players move forward too; in the Hindi film, they remain trapped in childhood innocence even as their bodies grow. (The bit about one of them having a prostitute–the word is used– as a girlfriend is never clarified).
The film, which is well-intentioned, often heartwarming, is also too simplistic. The script, written by Divy Nidhi Sharma, working with Fesser’s original, is studded with some pithy lines, but it also prevents the story from conveying its own points—the message is repeated over and over again and then some more.
Aamir Khan’s Gulshan has the clearest character graph, from his initial frustration to confronting his own prejudices and limitations. The transformation of Gulshan, from petulant and selfish to genuinely caring towards the team, his wife and his mother (Dolly Ahluwalia) forms the emotional core of the film, and Khan portrays all the shades with ease. The actors — Aroush Datta, Gopi Krishnan Varma, Vedant Sharmaa, Naman Misra, Rishi Shahani, Rishabh Jain, Ashish Pendse, Samvit Desai and Aayush Bhansali—are real charmers, uninhibited, and brimming with an infectious sense of joy that permeates the film.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
