Now let's get this straight. You might be a connoisseur of everything - from graphic novels and poha to kabaddi and Ukraine's politics on Facebook - we know your secret. You probably care as much about boxing, as about the amount of filth in the Yamuna and the partying deadline for the neighbour's son. So when Priyanka Chopra announced that she would be playing Mary Kom in a biographical film on the boxing champion, you must have already started making up the #MaarMaryMaar hashtags to grace Twitter and Facebook when you check in to a multiplex to watch the film.
The uncanny thing here is, director Omung Kumar (and 'creative director' Sanjay Leela Bhansali) knew exactly what you were thinking and guess what, they have given you a film with lines that could give Deepak Chopra and all the dialogues of Border and Veer Zara put together, a run for their money.
Here are our four (from roughly a few thousand) reasons why you should watch Mary Kom. And they have got nothing to do with wanting to know the boxer. Or having any interest in boxing.
1. Meet Mary Kom, the boxer trapped in a Karan Johar world
Mary Kom, the film, is basically Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham without its lehengas. But before you go into shock over the disappearance of disco ball wedding clothes, consider this: there's Priyanka Chopra in racer back tees that come in hot pink, red, electric blue, purple and a bunch of other colours legitimized by Gossip Girls. So if you can make this little compromise, Mary Kom has every emotion that Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham's cast had engaged in.
Sample this: Mary Kom's father, on finding out that despite his protests she has taken to boxing, asks her to choose between boxing and him. Our Mary, in the great Shah Rukh Khan tradition of synchronised nose-lip quivering, gets all upset and says she chooses boxing. Now, if you are not reminded of the very mature exchanges between Shah Rukh and Amitabh Bachchan in K3G, your memory should be praised for great immunity.
Then when the filmi Kom has babies, she stays up singing a five-minute long lullaby, obviously complete with an elaborate arranged background score. It's just sad that the aarti ki thaali couldn't be cast in this one. It would have been perfect otherwise.
Actually, in Omung Kumar's film, Priyanka Chopra's relationship with boxing, in spirit and character, is wonderfully reminiscent of the one Jaya Bachchan shared with Khan in Karan Johar's post-colonial Indian epic. In fact, Khan's replacement in Mary Kom, the pair of boxing gloves, does a fine job of displaying more legitimate human emotions than anyone did in Johar's film.
So you're actually set to watch a minimal, revised-for-multiplexes edition of K3G. And the heroine's a boxer. That's modern, feminist and supremely cool at the same time. They also have a sappy wedding song you can tag your boyfriend on Facebook with! How cool is that?
Only, the film doesn't tell you Mary Kom's stunning story. However, it does a great job of making a Bollywood fairytale out of it - complete with songs and dream sequences.
2. You don't care about boxing? The film doesn't either!
Assuming like three-fourth's of India's film-watching audience, you haven't really read up on Mary Kom and boxing, what does Omung Kumar's film tell us about both? Nothing.
No one can blame you if find young Mary's obsession with boxing as inexplicable as Ram Gopal Verma's infatuation with ghosts. Chopra's character says she loves boxing and you are expected to believe her. There's nothing in Mary Kom's screenplay that either explains or unravels how Kom came to love boxing so much. Yes, they show a young Mary picking up a boxing glove from what looks like the debris of a blast site, but unless the child is generally fascinated by oddly shaped things, the film says nothing about Mary's introduction to boxing.
Yes, it says Mary was a violent, temperamental youngster, somehow making it seem like the only reason she takes to boxing. By that logic, the hundred odd contestants from a dozen seasons of Roadies, half of Bangalore's auto-drivers and peak hour commuters in Mumbai locals, should have all made for stellar boxers by now.
Reports suggest that in Manipur, sports is a means for residents of villages to fight poverty. The complicated and visceral relationship that the state has with a sport like boxing is instead replaced with three songs in the first 40 minutes.
In fact, it's almost shameful how the film makes a caricature out of the sport. Priyanka's Kom is seen having visions of boxing matches while she is in labour and has been anaesthetized. Unless that was supposed to be a deep visual metaphor for labour pain, we don't see why a sport she loves will be something anyone would be hallucinating about while going into labour. There's a slight difference between delivering a baby and smoking weed, right? Clearly in director Kumar's world, they are equally exhilarating.
3. You know nothing about northeast India? It's okay man!
If you are the kind who cannot tell between the little states scrunched into the northeast extreme of India's political map, worry not, you'll survive. Because what Mary Kom tells you about Manipur is exactly what KBC's trailers have told you about Nagaland. Or what your best friend has been telling you about the girls' hair, skin and their secret, underground market for chic hot-pants for the last decade now.
At one point of the film, Chopra accuses the boxing federation for discriminating against her as she is from the 'northeast'. Even the language of outrage is so familiar - that is non-northeast - that you would imagine you are not watching an expensive Bollywood project on a sports hero from the northeast. You are watching a film on what you think the northeast is, one that could have been written in a Delhi coffee-shop with a working title Manipur ki beti Mary Kom or something that was being made for daily Indian soap.
There are winding mountain roads, pretty sunrises, women dancing in circles and people speaking in a Nepali accent- that's Manipur for you in Omung Kumar's Mary Kom.
4. Is 'Mere paas maa hai' the best thing you have heard in your life? Then Mary Kom's your film!
Coach" "Mary, tu khali pet boxing kar payegi naa?"
Mary: "Sir, pet to khushi she hi bhar gaya hai."
'Mere paas maa hai' should ideally feel a little scared right now. This is the closest any dialogue has come to threatening its pedestal. And Mary Kom is teeming with them.
For example this:
Mary: "Sir Chungneijang ko janam Appa, Ima ne diya. Use Mary Kom ko aapne banaya." "Mary aapke bagair boxing toh kar sakti hai, par jeet nahin sakti."
We are guessing the coach is a connoisseur of the K-serial school of dialogues. Else, he would have died of brain damage.
P.S: With Sanjay Leela Bhansali as the creative director of the film purists should grumble less and thank their stars that he didn't send Mary Kom tap dancing inside a boxing ring. Though that would have completed the film's Hum Boxing Kar Chuke Sanam-ness convincingly.
Copyright: firstpost.com
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