Spoiler alert: India defeats the unbeatable West Indies at Lord’s on June 25, 1983, to lift the cricket World Cup! The only thing left to find out therefore, as an audience, is how this story is treated/told. And in that sense, I do feel Kabir Khan’s 83 is a much better film than script
A still from 83
83
U/A: Drama
Dir: Kabir Khan
Cast: Ranveer Singh, Pankaj Tripathi, Deepika Padukone
Rating: 3.5/5
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This film has been so seemingly long in the making and thereafter waiting (for release) — with all its casting calls, like Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, making it to the press, and much later plaudits in social media out since the beginning of the release week itself — you could be tempted to believe the movie has already come, and gone. Of course, that’s not the case.
Most of the mainstream attention — and this is as mainstream an epic as it gets — has to do with how the cast of characters are so widely known. In fact every few years, in commemoration of the event that this film surveys in detail, its real life protagonists get paraded on TV, revealing anecdotes on how they did, what they did, every now and then anyway. Total underdogs for a national team, that in the past, had only won one match (against East Africa) in previous editions of the same tournament!
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Spoiler alert: India defeats the unbeatable West Indies at Lord’s on June 25, 1983, to lift the cricket World Cup! The only thing left to find out therefore, as an audience, is how this story is treated/told. And in that sense, I do feel Kabir Khan’s 83 is a much better film than script.
For a story, it’s essentially recreated matches — at some moments merged footage of cricketers from ’83, with images in the movie. All of it, of course, leading up to the finale. Which, if you include the closing credits celebrating the same sequence, lasts over half an hour — pretty much beating Lagaan, at its 27 minutes of a cricket match for a movie’s climax!
Lagaan obviously was pure fiction. Matches of 83, including the Lord’s final, is easily available online. Exception being the one between India and Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells in Kent. According to this film, that match never got televised, because the broadcaster BBC was on strike that day.
Cricket historians can shed light on this better. I’m told that’s just an urban legend, and that the BBC didn’t televise, simply because they didn’t think the match to be worthy enough. Either way, who was the star of that Tunbridge Wells, setting world record for highest run score (175) ever?
The same person, who is wholly the star of this film — Kapil Dev, or Kap in short for both his name, and his designation in the team. How does the hero play the captain here: “Naice, naice,” as Kapil would say, and Ranveer Singh says it so well as Kapil! This is genuinely a fine feather in Ranveer’s Kap.
Looking at him struggle with English also gives you a better sense of the diversity in the team, where the opening batsman Krish Srikkanth from Tamil Nadu was probably more comfortable in Queen’s English, and bowler Roger Binny was half Scot. Those of my vintage will remember Kapil also as the brand ambassador of Rapidex English speaking course later.
Although it’s slightly befuddling why Pankaj Tripathi as the team manager holds such a thick Hyderabadi twang, while the real-life PR Man Singh in the movie’s end credits has no such accent. Tripathi ji, in any case, is a pleasure on screen, so the added touch subtracts nothing from his performance.
For a movie hinged so strongly on nostalgia for a generation, good casting is anyway half the job done. No ducks there. There’s a massive younger lot in the audience too, living this for the first time. Given that the distance between 1983 and 2021 is the same as between 1945 and 1983 — that’s a lot! To zero in on the story still — what do we have for antagonist/conflict/strategy here, besides that a fledgeling side miraculously picked up the World Cup?
Frankly, can’t see much. There’s West Indies for the major obstacle, yes — a team that came to dominate world cricket, and a story told so strikingly in the film Fire in Babylon (2010) that you must catch, if you get the time.
The prime casualty in the ’83 squad and film looks to be the little master, Sunil Gavaskar (Tahir Bhasin) —permanently sullen, a wholly side-lined Sunny, India’s greatest batsman by far at the time; way better than his own team, strutting around with a beatific smile still.
That Sunny and Kapil didn’t get along is known. He replaced Kapil as captain only a year after ’83! Maybe these nuances can be better explored only in a full-length series, along the lines of Bodyline (1984). Something the world’s only genuinely cricket-crazy country deserves. If nothing, then as an antidote to the sleazy gaze/lens of Amazon Prime Video’s Inside Edge.
For a larger point/purpose though, the filmmakers shift the camera to two locations. One, among soldiers in the Indo-Pak border — contrasting sport as war without weapons, and a patriotism that is way less self-destructive hence. And then at the communal riots going on in a town called Nawabpur, brought together still by their love for their nation, likely to win the World Cup. Again, defining nationalism in its most positive form, as against mad, hate-led jingoism, that’s been screwing Indians lately, desi movies included.
But the finest achievement of 83 as a film, and its re-recording/recreation of pop history, is quite simply that it gets the emotions right, and pulls off the cricket fine — even if falling for the over-the-top, on occasion, and aiming for tear ducts, quite often.
You might find a lot of people say they had tears in their eyes. And that’s really the magic of the big screen — nobody’s seen the events of England, 1983, as a theatre of war, quite like that before. And it’s the only way to see it. I hear the movie will drop on both Hotstar+Disney and Netflix — nope, don’t bother there; head to the cinemas, for sure.
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