Ghoomer review: Abhishek Bachchan, Shabana Azmi spin this formulaic film into contention

Saiyami Kher and Abhishek A Bachchan in Ghoomer. (Screen grab/Zee Music)

“Yeh zindagi logic ka nahi, magic ka khel hai,” Paddy, a drunken slob who daylights as a coach, says, in R. Balki’s Ghoomer. More than just a theory, it’s also an appeal that the filmmaker is trying to make to his audience. Ghoomer’s premise is unlikely, its trajectory familiar, but the creators are convinced that once the emotional bedding of a story has been laid, they can cradle the wildest of dreams. It’s the apparatus that Ghoomer works with as a film trying to not just tell the usual cricketing underdog story but one that is also trying to engineer a pleasing fallacy. One where cricketing authenticity is both questioned and to an extent, even amended. It’s a bit churlish, even comic at times, but it’s also sincere, affecting and eerily moving.

Saiyami Kher plays Anina, a batting protégé who makes it to the Indian women’s cricket team. Anina is driven, aggressive and a bit of a firebrand. She accosts men who ogle female cricketers, and likes to manhandle her soft, supportive lover, played by Angad Bedi. Anina’s careerism is assisted by a likeable family, the standout member of which is Dadi, played by a terrific Shabana Azmi. Dadi is the unsentimental mentor, a deliciously shrewd guardian who refuses to mince words, or cushion facts for the sake of agreeable rhetoric. “Main Federer ki fan hun. Hum emotion nahi dikhate,” she claims at one point. At a training schedule Anina meets Paddy, a drunken, middle-aged slob, with a single game for the national team to his name. Paddy is smug, suicidal and a tragic emblem of the sportsmen who never quite become stars. On the eve of her departure, Anina meets with an accident and loses her right arm. The rest of the film is a familiar tale of a hard man pushing a player back towards contentious, hard-earned glory.

Not a lot separates Ghoomer from the countless sporting underdog films we’ve seen before. Anina becomes Paddy’s purpose as much as his ashen wit and snide attitude become her motivation. All she desires is not to be looked at as a victim and it’s precisely what the unwinnable Paddy offers. It’s a familiar wicket, and Balki’s writing bowls over it with an equally familiar line and length. Oddball tasks make up for training methods, theories about sporting greatness ferment the idea that standards are merely metaphysical blocks. In fact, the suggestive title of the film twirls into meaning – quite literally – as part of a rousing, though overstretched, climax. It’s as preposterous as it is also emotionally affecting. This is cinema, quite literally stealing sport’s rigid, sense of thunder.

For once Abhishek Bachchan truly finds shoes that fit, as a risible, disgruntled has-been. He lives in a shanty, drinks like he wants to die, but speaks like a prophet with few words to spare. Paddy also happens to live with Rasika, a transwoman he has apparently given a new lease of life. It’s a fascinating coat of paint, until it starts to verbally admire the walls it is allowed to hug. The relationship somewhat cushions the otherwise discomforting sight of a man so bitter, he comes across as sourer than the drink he guzzles. Despite that thin character sketch, Balki’s writing, at least for leading characters, is on the mark. Kher plays Anina, as a woman who thrives on adrenaline, who’d possibly die out of a lack of purpose before she dies for the lack of a beating heart, or in this case, the use of her right arm. It’s why she is rarely contemplative, her family unanimously supportive, in a portrayal that risks few inner battles, so the external one can flourish unchecked. It’s convenient but essayed with authority still.

There are obvious flaws to Ghoomer. Though ably directed and designed, the film’s mutinous origin and buoyant sense of purpose drive it towards the cliff that fabulists lean over for inspiration. Anina’s is unanimously surrounded by woke people, none more so than a cricketing administration that must be inspired by something other than reality. Far too many puzzle pieces click in tandem, as the cosmos conspires, from the rosy seat of nonchalance, to reward an unlikely tale, with an unlikelier ending. In fact, the climax, though exhilarating as a spectacle, undermines the humanity of the story.  Not every delivery, Balki forgets, has to be hit out of the park for sporting passion to find the arms of amenable compassion. In fact, a needless narrative twist at the death attempts to unthread that which needn’t be unspooled at all. It overcomplicates rather than add to an already sluggish last leg.

Ghoomer also features a stirring cameo by Amitabh Bachchan. For once, though, it’s his son, alongside an unmissable Azmi, who holds the fort of a predictable but also earnest sporting fairy-tale. The last time Bachchan offered us something as vile and ragged that it was impossible to look away from – Mani Ratnam’s Yuva – his career seemed to brim with promise. Decades later, he has delivered something of an encore, a performance that though conventional, hints at a more meaningful application of the apparatus that his lanky, coarsened figure represents. Turns out you can eek a performance out of him, as much as you can make a film that though predictable, casually spins towards infectiousness. You can see it coming, but it’s impossible to look away.

Ghoomer released in theatres on August 18, 2023.