By the time they land at the National Sports Academy, where the coach becomes a rival to Mahavir, they’re suddenly part of a whole team of young-women wrestlers. In the first half, it implies that Geeta and her sister are breaking the mold - that they’re heading into boys’ terrain, to the point that they have no choice but to wrestle boys.
Aamir khan movies dangal movie#
The movie is way too vague about the essential facts of female wrestling in India. Geeta is so fierce, yet is so carrying out the will of her father (which becomes her will), that she’s a revolutionary and a bowing disciple at the same time. She has a gentle, dimpled face, but with her hair cropped she resembles a competitively coiled Kate Winslet, and there’s something touching in her devotion. When the girls get older, the film switches actresses (the two younger ones, Zaira Wasim and Suhani Bhatnagar, are big-eyed urchins who barely register), and Fatima Sana Shaikh, who takes over the role of Geeta, emerges as Khan’s co-star. It’s the equivalent of watching an American movie with the same story starring Greg Kinnear as the dad/coach and Dove Cameron and Lizzy Greene as the daughters, only with the cliché training sequence set to “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” “Dangal” is that kind of movie. The movie isn’t a musical, but it’s got a lot of those tabla-meets-EDM Bollywood dance tracks, and when one of them is laid over a training montage, the effect is less Bollywood than cookie-cutter Hollywood. But Nitesh Tiwari, the director of “Dangal,” works strictly on the surface. There is - or could have been - a resonance to all of this. It’s a lot like a Marine cut as the two see it, they’ve been shorn (tearfully) of their identities, which their father will now rebuild from the ground up. When they’re teenagers, he subjects them to a grueling training regimen (worst restriction: no spicy food), and the defining moment comes when he cuts off their hair. That means, among other things, that he’s going to treat his daughters with no mercy.
If the movie has a theme, it’s that Mahavir is a patriarchal thinker forced, by circumstance, to move into the 21st century. But when God blesses him with daughters, he transfers his obsession with molding a champion right onto them as a coach, he’s both a domineering egotist and a de facto feminist. In “Dangal,” is Mahavir a domineering stage father, using his kids to live out his failed dreams? No doubt. So he took his two eldest daughters, Geeta and Babita, and turned them into competitive wrestlers, cutting against the grain of what Indian society wanted and expected girls to be.
It’s based on the true story of Mahavir Singh Phogat, an amateur wrestler who lived for the proud dream of seeing his country take home athletic “gold.” (It sounds like he’s talking about the Olympics, but he means any international competition.) Due to a lack of government sports funding, Mahavir wasn’t able to go for the gold himself (he became an office worker). audiences will have much patience for it.
“Lagaan,” which was close to four hours, earned every minute of its running time, but “Dangal” is just a thin inspirational tale stretched out well past the point that U.S. That’s more than you can say for “Dangal,” a one-trick domestic sports drama that drags on for two hours and 40 minutes.