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Sitaare Zameen Par Movie Review & Rating: An insensitive, self-centered basketball coach is suspended from his job and forced to perform community service: in three months, he must develop a group of young adults, the majority of whom have Down Syndrome, into a tournament-ready team. Based on the 2018 Spanish film Campeones, ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ uses the original’s determinedly cheerful tone to win matches; in the process, it also wins our hearts.
Gulshan (Aamir Khan) has an attitude problem, which he utilizes to make everyone else uncomfortable. His wife, Sunita (Genelia d’Souza), want a child. He does not. His senior coach prefers compliance. Gulshan behaves horribly. A drunk driving incident sends him, with reluctance and truculence, to a vocational center for people with special needs. Where he meets a bunch of lively adolescents who question his concept of ‘yeh bechaare bachche’: Satbir, Guddu, Bantu, Hargovind, Sharmaji, Lotus, Raju, Kareem, Sunil, and Golu are all young people with unique personality traits that go beyond their facial Downs uniqueness, often confused vocalisation, and other autism spectrum impairments. These are young individuals who have a sense of self and enjoy themselves, and Gulshan gradually finds himself attracted into their circle, and what began as a punishment evolves into pure affection.
This film would not have worked as effectively as it did if Aamir hadn’t been so determined to portraying himself as a hero-who-is-a-jerk, allowing us to skip over the annoyingly noble Lal Singh Chadha character, who never hit any of his targets. One of Aamir’s strengths is playing an ordinary, flawed guy who realizes his mistakes (yes, ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ is also in this pantheon), and Gulshan is a wonderful addition.
The insufferable Gulshan discovers a better side of himself, replacing the smirk with a smile, is a big part of ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’: you can call it what it is, but you can also see how a star can power a story like this, in the way it platforms and makes visible those who live with disabilities.
It teeters dangerously close to becoming an Aamir Khan vehicle- look, look, I am not irredeemable, even if I begin by calling these adults ‘paagal’ and’mental’, which is consistent with how society at large views ‘differentness’-but it manages to strike a balance by allowing it to be a film about neurodivergent young people who, while not leading the narrative, have an equal say in it.
Making a film about intellectual disability is a risky endeavor. If you make people cry, members of the community may accuse the filmmakers of being miserabilists; if you make them laugh, you may be blamed with making light of a difficult situation.
Borrowing the original’s tone, ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ decides to stay on the side of humor, which is a sensible option because what you can say to the common person through chuckles can often carry more weight than wrung-out tears. The last time I saw an effective film starring a character with Downs was Nikhil Pherwani’s ‘Ahaan,’ which should have been seen by more people; ‘Sitaare’ has the stellar gravitas to reach far and wide, and I’m glad it’s more feel-good than feel-bad.
Watch Sitaare Zameen Par Movie trailer here:
Because, make no mistake, this is a film that explicitly seeks to normalize ‘everyone’s normal’. It doesn’t shy away from being message-y—sab ka apna apna normal hota hai—but it’s not preachy. It is here to tell us that parents and caregivers who live with children with Downs (autism is also mentioned in a couple of places, which is fine because one of the kids in the film has Aspergers Syndrome, but in one startlingly misleading instance, a character mentions ‘invisible autism’: what is that?) are sensitive, and rightfully so, to the word ‘bechaara’: the necessity of the hour has always been acceptance, not pity. Because acceptance is bearing collective responsibility for those who are ‘different’, rather than expressing pity on occasion and then stuffing it back inside.
The 2007 film ‘Taare Zameen Par’ pushed dyslexia to the forefront, with Aamir playing a teacher who coaxes a near-suicidal student out of the hole he has dug for himself. ‘Sitaare’ is a near-reprisal, but also a clever reversal, in which the teacher becomes the taught. This is not to imply that ‘Sitaare’ is without defects. In some places, the explanations become a little stagey, despite the fact that Gurpal Singh’s character offers a lovely restrained emotional core to the man who runs the remedial center; in other places, the humor is heavy-handed. Sometimes the film flattens.
But none of these are deal-breakers. It sticks to its middle-of-the-road story-telling without trying for any sophistication which would have been wrong for this film, and keeps drama to a minimum, or let’s say as much as it can in a Bollywood film. A sub-thread, featuring Dolly Ahluwalia as Gulshan’s Lajpat-Nagar-ki-mummyji and her soft spot, played by Brijendra Kala, is entertaining enough to run away with the film; it circles back to our sporty gang just in time. It’s good to see Genelia d’Souza back after a gap, even though her wobbly Hindi diction distracts you from thinking of her as a Dilli girl.
Aamir is the star who has done the green-lighting and the heavy-lifting and staying the course. But the young adults who try and make the most of their challenges– on a learning curve that never stops, a situation which can be both exhausting and encouraging– are the true ‘sitaare’ of this film: the one who dyes his hair in rainbow colours, the one who hates having baths because of a childhood trauma, the one who can look at a plane in the air and tell you which route it is flying, the one who is forced to work long hours with low wages, the one who has had a bad experience with previous coaches, the one who wears a helmet and a smart mouth, and the lone girl in this gang, who personifies feisty. Director RS Prasanna and the authors went to great lengths to portray them as actual people with feelings and opinions, who are who they are because to an extra chromosomal accident, rather than objects of pity. It’s their guts and glory.
Sitaare Zameen Par Movie cast: Aamir Khan, Genelia D’Souza, Gurpal Singh, Gopi Krishna Varma, Aroush Dutta, Vedant Sharma, Naman Mishra, Rishabh Jain, Rishi Sahani, Ashish Pendse, Samvit Desai, Ayush Bhansali, Simran Mangeshkar, Dolly Ahluwalia, Brijendra Kala
Sitaare Zameen Par Movie director: R S Prasanna
Sitaare Zameen Par Movie rating: 3.5 stars
Source: IE
