Sudha Kongara’s Sarfira, her Hindi remake of her Tamil film Soorarai Pottru (2020), is based on Air Deccan founder GR Gopinath’s memoir Simply Fly and “stories from Indian aviation”. The saga of how India’s first low-cost airline came up in the 2000s is a tribute to Indian entrepreneurship as well as a cautionary tale of what happens to those who try to compete with crony capitalists.
When former Indian Air Force pilot Vir Mhatre (Akshay Kumar) decides to convert his pie-in-the-sky project into reality, he goes up against Jaz Airlines founder Paresh Goswami (Paresh Rawal). Goswami doesn’t just have a direct line to the aviation minister. As Vir ries to launch a no-fuss, affordable airline that he jokingly calls a “flying Udupi hotel”, he learns that Paresh Goswami is Indian aviation personified.
Vir’s strongest ally is his wife Rani (Radhika Madan). Their partnership of equals is driven by their shared quirkiness but is tested ever so often by the pressures that come their way from Goswami.
In attempting to highlight the difficulties faced by Vir, Sudha Kongara and co-writer Shalini Ushadevi drum up the drama, turn on the faucets and pump up the volume. Every possible obstacle rises in Vir’s path, leading to overwrought scenes that border on the fantastical despite supposedly being based on actual incidents.
A carnivalesque air hangs over Vir’s mission, which finds support from his entire village. Fists fly and there are mad sprints on runways as Vir tries to get Air Deccan off the ground. If there was an opportunity to curb the excess of the original movie, it was clearly ignored.
It is as though Vir’s dream to disrupt the elitism associated with flying by making it affordable to working-class travellers is so impossible, its depiction must be as exaggerated as possible.
What Sarfira does well – as did Soorarai Pottru – is capture the pig-headed determination that guides entrepreneurs, especially in India. Despite viewing Vir’s feats through a cascade of tears, Sarfira gets a few things right: the queuing up for appointments, the begging for a hearing, the willpower to stand up after being knocked down over and over again.
The Hindi version runs into a few air pockets that it finds hard to navigate. Viewers of Soorarai Pottru, which is available on Prime Video along with a Hindi-dubbed version Udaan, will find nothing new in its frame-by-frame remake.
The casting poses a more glaring problem. Suriya, who starred in the Tamil movie, easily fit the part of a man who has made a midlife decision to reinvent himself. However, 56-year-old Akshay Kumar does not.
Age presents an even greater problem in the case of 29-year-old Radhika Madan, who is cast as Vir’s wife. Did nobody on this production top to think that the Kumar-Madan pairing looks utterly unconvincing, especially since they have several lovey-dovey scenes? In Soorarai Pootru, the cute romance between Suriya and Aparna Balamurali provided a soothing touch, which is missing in the remake.
