Cast: Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal, Radhika Madan, Seema Biswas, R. Sarathkumar, Saurabh Goyal, Krishnakumar Balasubramaniam Direction: Sudha Kongara Sitting through 156 minutes of ‘Sarfira’ is as tedious as starting an airline and almost as challenging as hoodwinking a venture capitalist to part with his money for a half-baked idea. Everything here is high voltage.
You yearn for silence and you do get as much of it as you would snatch at a busy airport. It is firstly tiring when you have to sit through nearly three hours of a biopic. More so when you are told that the maker has taken fictional liberties.
Inspired by ‘Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey’, the film version in south came to be made as ‘Soorarai Pottru’ which garnered eyeballs aplenty and awards to match. The life story of Air Deccan: involving its founder G.R.
Gopinath. Yes the life of a visionary who attempted and succeeded in establishing a low-cost airline and broke the glass ceiling is bound to have its quota of ebbs and flows. So it was with Gopinath.
The challenge, therefore, for film-maker Sudha Kongara was to make the chaff from the grass. Considering that she made the film in Tamil, one would have expected her to iron out the creases. Obviously fortified by the national-level encouragement and recognition, she decides to replicate largely and marginally adapt it in the Marathi milieu replacing its original Tamil backdrop.
There lies the first designer porthole in this monsoon release. There are plen.
