Film review: Sarbjit is a tragedy in capital letters

In her new movie Sarbjit, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan comes to work with her greatest asset – her gorgeous face. In scene after scene, Rai Bachchan flashes her eyes, curls her lips, flares her nostrils and twists her features out of shape.

Sarbjit is the kind of movie in which emotions are deemed unworthy of existence unless they are screamed out with every sinew strained. It’s more labour than Rai Bachchan has ever performed in her spotty career, and if nothing else, she deserves full marks for effort.

Directed by Omung Kumar, the production designer-turned-tear harvester, Sarbjit is based on the real-life account of the unfortunate Sarabjit Singh. Singh was arrested by Pakistani border guards in 1990, accused of being an Indian spy who had been involved in bomb blasts in Lahore and Faisalabad, and thrown into prison. His sister, Dilraj Kaur, proclaimed his innocence and campaigned tirelessly for his release. But Singh languished on death row until he was killed in an attack by prison inmates in 2013.

Opinion is divided on Singh’s real identity: was he a low-level intelligence operative who made the mistake of being caught or a farmer who strayed into Pakistan and paid heavily for his mistake? The former theory could have made a fascinating scapegoats-of-statecraft account. But it’s far easier to make a three-hankie weepie about an innocent man who suffered along with his family, and that’s just what Omung Kumar has done.

The 132-minute movie opens in the border village where Sarbjit (Randeep Hooda) lives with his wife Sukhpreet (Richa Chadha), two infant daughters and his widower father. Dilraj (Rai Bachchan), who is deeply attached to her brother, has left her husband and returned to her family (in real life, Singh was part of a much larger brood).

When Sarbjit accidentally crosses the border in a drunken state and is jailed on charges of spying, Dilraj swings into action. She bangs away at her sewing machine with determination, stomps through the corridors of power to persuade officials of her brother’s innocence, and delivers lectures on Indo-Pak peace on every possible occasion. Sukhpreet, depicted as a diffident and docile woman, contributes to the general hysteria by fainting at opportune moments.

Some moving sequences survive the delirium. In an early scene that establishes the relationship between the siblings, Sarbjit persuades Dilraj to give up the corpse of her stillborn child – a rare moment of subtlety. In a later conversation, Sarbjit dismisses his sister’s despair that her efforts have been futile. “What have you done for me?” he tells her. "You made my name roam free across the world."

Meanwhile, Sarbjit wastes away, his wrestler’s body and mind eaten up by his miserable conditions and the lasting regret that he was in the wrong place in the wrong time.

Despite the title, it’s Dilraj who drives the story, refusing to accept her brother’s seemingly inevitable fate and making enough of a ruckus this side of the border to buy him a longer lease of life at the other end. By the second half, even Hooda, who is convincing in the initial sequences, cannot be unaffected by the overwrought air around him and contributes his own overly dramatic bits to a movie that refuses to quiet down.

Were it stripped of its insistent melodrama, Sarbjit might have been an interesting (if heavily fictionalised) account of an ordinary family caught in the midst of a geopolitical war. The screenplay by Utkarshini Vashishtha and Rajesh Beri has its share of anti-Pakistan sentiment, but it takes care to humanise ordinary Pakistanis, who are shown as helping Sarbjit, whether it’s smuggling letters to him in prison or standing up to represent him in court despite criticism (the lawyer Awaid Shaikh’s character is played by Darshan Kumar).

The writers put Sarbjit’s fate against the backdrop of repeated terrorist attacks on India, but the jingoism is dialled down to the minimum requirement. They also slip in the point that there are many Sarabjits in Indian prisons. Some moving sequences survive the delirium. In an early scene that establishes the relationship between the siblings, Sarbjit persuades Dilraj to give up the corpse of her stillborn child – a rare moment of subtlety. A family reunion before Sarbjit’s death is bathed in bathos, but manages to be touching in its portrayal of the family’s enduring loss. In a later conversation, Sarbjit dismisses his sister’s despair that her efforts have been futile. “What have you done for me?” he tells her. "You made my name roam free across the world."