Sitaare Zameen Par

Since more than a decade, one has seen a large number of sports movies being made in mainstream Hindi cinema. So much so that it has now become exhausting. Filmmaker RS Prasanna and Aamir Khan’s Sitaare Zameen Par, thankfully, doesn’t appear as just another sports film from the industry. Sitaare Zameen Par is the official Hindi remake of the Spanish film Campeones (English title: Champions). The story is based in Delhi and it revolves around the assistant coach of Delhi’s basketball team, Gulshan Arora (Aamir Khan). He is an arrogant, brash and a hot-headed guy. His nature once gets him into trouble when he hits his senior coach Paswan (Deepraj Rana) in a fit of rage. Hence, he gets suspended from his job.

A film that entertains, tugs your heart strings, addresses important societal issues and retains the feel-good factor, has become increasingly rare in Bollywood. Even though it is a remake of the 2018 Spanish film Champions (which also had a Hollywood remake with Woody Harrelson, a few years later) Sitaare Zameen Par, with all its highs and lows, manages to come out triumphant.

Talent, teamwork and tenacity are attributes that, as a rule, occupy centrestage in a sports drama. These qualities come to the aid of a team of hoopsters that fights to beat the odds stacked against it. Add to the proceedings a dash of feel-good, high-spirited humour and periodic tugs at the heartstrings and you have Sitaare Zameen Par, somewhat inconsistent in pace but always entertaining. The underdog story, scripted by Divy Nidhi Sharma and directed by R.S. Prasanna, pivots around ten neurodiverse basketball players placed under a reluctant coach, an angry not-so-young man in dire need of a course correction. The team does not get along with the coach. A judge assigns the job to the latter as punishment for ramming his car into a police vehicle in a drunk driving case. Although they find winning ways difficult to come by to begin with, each member of the outfit makes steady progress on and off the basketball court.

An insensitive, full-of-himself basketball coach, suspended from his job, finds himself doing community service: in three months he has to shape a group of young adults, largely with Down’s Syndrome, into a team that is capable of participating in tournaments. Based on the 2018 Spanish film Campeones, ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ adopts the original’s determinedly cheery vein to win its matches; in the process, it also wins our hearts. Gulshan (Aamir Khan) is the guy with an attitude problem, and he uses it to make everyone around him unhappy. His wife Sunita (Genelia d’Souza) wants a baby. He doesn’t. His senior coach wants compliance. Gulshan behaves badly. A drunk driving incident leads him, reluctance and truculence firmly in place, to a vocational centre for people with special needs. Here he encounters a group of spirited youngsters who challenge his idea of ‘yeh bechaare bachche’: Satbir, Guddu, Bantu, Hargovind, Sharmaji, Lotus, Raju, Kareem, Sunil, Golu are all young people with specific personality quirks which go beyond their facial Down’s distinctiveness, often unclear vocalisation and other limitations which are part of the autism spectrum. These are young people who have a sense of self, and fun: slowly but surely, Gulshan finds himself being drawn into their circle, and what started as a punishment becomes pure affection.

There is a self-aware moment in Sitaare Zameen Par that nicely parodies the moral science cinema of Aamir Khan. A team of neurodivergent basketball players has won a precious free throw in a losing game. Their coach, Gulshan, can’t stop pep-talking the player about to take the shot. Satbir (Aroush Datta) loses his head and yells out. “Sir, pehle aap chup rahiye,” he thunders, telling Gulshan to shut up. Khan — one of the most didactic superstars India has ever produced — needs to surround himself with more Satbirs. In his directorial debut, Taare Zameen Par, a landmark film from 2007, Khan played Nikumbh, a sensitive art teacher who mentors a dyslexic child in a boarding school. The audience, too, felt mentored meaningfully by Khan, their hearts and minds broadened by a thoughtful, virtuous star. Khan spiked his hair and dressed up in a clown suit for the role. Yet, every so often, we spotted a halo behind his head.

What might Aamir Khan’s last decade-and-a-half have been like had he not done 3 Idiots? I’d imagine his fans, and maybe the man himself, would look at the 2009 film as a positive turning point. It was, after all, a wild success, one that set Khan up for other, even more successful films in the same vein. He was already gravitating towards morally instructive projects; Taare Zameen Par (2007), his first as director, was about a gifted dyslexic child. But 3 Idiots showed how happy audiences were to be lectured at if you made yourself look silly and made them feel smart. Always tagged as a ‘thinking actor’, Khan now seemed determined to make audiences think, even if his films often did the thinking for them.