‘Sarfira’ review: Budget airline, wasteful storytelling

Person who doesn’t watch Indian films: “She’s feeding the birds.”

Person who watches too many of them: “She’s dealing in metaphors.”

Veer (Akshay Kumar) is moping on his terrace. He’s been trying to get his low-cost airline business going, but there have only been setbacks. He watches morosely as his wife, Rani (Radhika Madan), holds out grain for sparrows. I could have written the scene from this point on: birdfeed is fuel, sparrows are small planes, Bob’s your uncle.

Here’s the real problem: this is the most sophisticated bit of screenwriting in Sudha Kongara’s Sarfira. A few scenes earlier, Veer is smuggled into a talk by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. When the room is opened up to questions, he stands up and, instead of calmly explaining how the civil aviation machinery has been bought off by airline mogul Paresh Goswami (Paresh Rawal), he ends up yelling at the President. Somehow this earns him a private meeting with Kalam—an excuse for a flashback, in which Veer learns his estranged father is on his deathbed. At the airport, he realizes he’s short of money. Desperate, he asks strangers to loan him 5,000 rupees; their indifference is a vague indictment of the aviation sector and the elite who avail of it. A little boy says, “Father, why don’t you help this man?” It's gruelling to sit through storytelling this unsophisticated.

Kongara’s film is based on the life on G.R. Gopinath, an air force pilot who started a budget airline in the early 2000s. Like most Indian films working off promising real-life material, Sarfira does everything it can to negate the advantages, burying scenes in eyeroll-inducing drama. Everything is a production. Rani finally accepting Veer’s marriage proposal is transformed into a garish set piece with a loudspeaker and dozens of extras in a marketplace. As for the ‘software bug’ at the end, why waste time on a revelation that’s not only implausible but inherently uncinematic?  

Like Jawan (2023), Sarfira gave me the weird feeling of watching a Tamil film made in Hindi—except here, this is literally the case. The film is a remake of Soorarai Pottru (2020), which starred Suriya, and which Kongara wrote and directed. It’s not as awkward as when Konagara shot her 2016 boxing film Irudhi Suttru as Saala Khadoos in Hindi. Instead, it’s like hearing a singer hit notes that are just off. Whether it's the pace Hindi actors perform at or the cutting rhythms, there's a dissonance. 

Goswami is so patently evil he can hardly be taken seriously. Of course the class-conscious, casteist man who’s willing to let a planeload of passengers crash if it puts a rival out of business will lose in the end. Rawal is smug and predictable; it’s a shame Prakash Belawadi—who turns up as a venture capitalist—isn’t playing the part instead. And it’s depressing to see Madan in a film like this, opposite Kumar, who’s been acting since before she was born. Rani isn’t a token part—she’s as individualistic as her husband—but it’s a hollow one. Hindi cinema is failing Madan; she’s so good at playing the loud confident girl that this is all she gets to do. 

Shrikant, released in May, was another ode to Indian entrepreneurship, but it differed in one significant way from Kongara’s film. Rajkummar Rao’s blind paper manufacturer reiterates throughout that he’s in it for profits, not for the betterment of the sightless. But in Sarfira, Veer hardly seems to care about becoming a profitable business. He only gets down to numbers when he has to attract or reassure investors, and then too all his talk is about breaking even. Success for him is helping ordinary Indians fly on the cheap—a part that comes attached, almost inevitably, to an actor whose penchant for playing virtuous innovators has become a ready punchline. Does anyone know which phase of the Akshay Kumar Social Work Universe we are in?