Prior to Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, which released on July 17, 2015, Salman’s Eid release with Kareena Kapoor Khan was the execrable Bodyguard.
We forgave Salman for Bodyguard after Bajrangi Bhaijaan.In this moving film the bonding between ‘Bajrangi’ Salman Khan and ‘Munni’ Harshaali Malhotra is so authentic palpable and immediate, you see them feel each other’s turmoil and anguish even if they don’t/can’t speak with one another. As the bond between the heart-breakingly vulnerable girl and her Hanuman bhakt savior protector and makeshift guardian grows we see a tender subtle shift in the guardian-child power dynamics. The sharp intelligent sensitive Munni realizes her guardian is a large-hearted simpleton. She takes charge of their destiny as they journey illegally from Pakistan to India, and are confronted with many sticky spots when Salman’s character naïve honesty gets them into trouble.
Salman Khan’s character Bajrangi ’s innocence honesty and vulnerability remind us of Sanjay Dutt in Raju Hirani’s Munnabhai films. All we can say is, thank God little lost Munni found a new avatar of Munnabhai. What if she had fallen into the wrong hands? Then this would be an Anurag Kashyap film. Ugly ugly….
The supple chemistry between Bajrangi and the spicy spirited Rasika, played with spice and spirit by Kareena Kapoor is a treat to behold.Only Rasika seems to fully appreciate Bajrangi’s priceless integrity and unconditional goodness. It doesn’t take her long to make up her mind that this is the man for her. In a moment of impulsive defiance Rasika leads Pavan/Bajrangi by his hand to her father(Sharat Saxena, very competent) while he is entertaining her prospective groom and his family .Teekhi taaliyan.
Once little Munni, the cute stowaway from Pakistan, is brought into Bajrangi’s adopted home in Delhi , director Kabir Khan lets the characters play a delectable game of cat-and-mouse with the girl’s identity.It’s almost like protecting that alien in Steven Spielberg’s ET. Except that the hero chosen to protect the little lost girl in Bajrangi Bhaijaan is super-vulnerable.
There is a super-powerful message on the need to spread love togetherness on both sides of the border. But the message is never hammered in. Kabir Khan simply lets the tale of the naïve Hanuman bhakt and his Pakistani mehmaan play itself out with minimum fuss and flamboyance. The telling of the tale is where the real magic of the message unfolds.
The second-half of the film when Bajrangi is determined to take Munni back to her home in Pakistan is done in the style of a rugged road movie, with Salman and his little co-star travelling across rough terrain on stubborn jeeps and on top of rickety buses. Like Imtiaz Ali’s cinema, Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan unfolds across the heartland of India creating map of the human heart in the process.
Some of the film’s best scenes feature Salman and Nawazuddin Siddiqui who makes his entry in the second-half as a small-time Pakistani tv journalist hungering for a scoop. The rapport between Salman and Siddiqui is splendidly subdued and yet strong. The characters that the duo meets in ‘Pakistan’(actually the film was shot only in India) include a memorable cameo by Om puri as a Mulavi running a madrasa in the Pakistani hinterland. At the end of his encounter with Bajrangi the Maulvi says, ‘Jai Shri Ram’ while Bajrangi awkwardly raises his hand for ‘Khuda Hafiz. Such emblematic gestures of communal and geo-political goodwill would have looked corny and contrived in any other film. Not in Kabir Khan’s film. India or Pakistan, his heart is in the right place.
The film builds to a very filmy climax. By the time Adnan Sami appears to sing the qawwalli Bhar de jholi meri Kabir pulls out all stops for an all-out tryst with melodramatic twists and turns .This includes a near-meeting between Munni and her estranged grieving mother as the evocative Qawwalli plays in the background. This is Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony set at an octave agreeable to Raju Hirani.
The performances from actors even in the smallest of roles is on-target. The dialogues and the situations sparkle with humour. Check out the kind but caustic village wise-man in the beginning who suggests to little mute Harshaali’s parents that they should take her to a dargah in Delhi. Or the scenes where Salman gets into a burqa to play Nawaz’s beghum as they sneak Munni into her native village by hook and by crook.Priceless.
The finale is a rousing homage to the spirit of melodrama that has sustained the tradition of mainstream Hindi cinema for decades. Bajrangi’s return to India safe and sound as thousands of Pakistanis cheer and break down the gates dividing the country are all done in a spirit of fantasy. Kabir Khan admits the finale is utopian. But hell, when did we ever enjoyed a flourish of wishful thinking to such an extent? More power to the imagination. And we can’t wait to see what this director does next. With or without Salman.
Bajrangi Bhaijaan pulled down the barbed wires between India and Pakistan…no ‘fence’ meant.
The impact of this film was far more deep and far-reaching than anyone involved with the film could’ve ever imagined.
In a bizarre transposition of the reel into the real, a 16-year old girl named Geeta, claiming to have strayed from the Indian border to Pakistan as a child, surfaced across the border in an exact replication of the situation in Bajrangi Bhaijaan.Making the real-life case even more bizarre is the fact that Geeta, like little Munni in Bajrangi … was mute and therefore couldn’t elucidate her whereabouts in India.
Director Kabir Khan was incredulous at the turn of events. “Except for the fact that in my film the girl strays from Pakistan to India and here in real life Geeta’s journeyed in the opposite direction , everything else that is happening seems like out of my movie. I had heard how truth is stranger than fiction. But this is beyond anything Salman and I ever imagined.”
Kabir confessed he never imagined his film would have such impact. “We hoped that the film would reach across borders. But to see it impact a life so far away is beyond our expectations.When I was making Bajrangi Bhaijaan I thought we were going into a Utopian world. But now I realize we were actually building a very real world. Geeta coming forward is proof that our vision in the film was not impractical.”
