I’m not sure which surprises me more: the idea that India cares about basketball or the idea that India cares about the mentally challenged. I’m glad on both counts, of course, especially the latter. But isn’t this the country where any physical or mental handicap automatically puts you in the lowest caste? Looks like I need to know more about India’s caste system … and update my awful stereotypes.
Gulshon Aurora (Aamir Khan) is a dick. He is secondarily a talented assistant basketball coach, but he’s primarily a dick. After a confrontation with his own head coach, he gets fired and then arrested on a DWI. All of this was avoidable if Gulshon could just play nice with the head coach. But, hey, dick’s gotta dick. The next part is the key and I’m not sure judges really make rulings of this nature, but Gulshon is given a choice of jail time or coaching a local team of intellectually challenged basketball players.
What would you pick, coach?
It’s important to note here that despite the extremely poor quality of athletics that follows, the people who play basketball care. They care if they play well. They care if they win or lose. They don’t care enough to play defense, ever, it seems, but they do care.
Now, if this plot sounds familiar it’s because Bobby Farrelly and Woody Harrelson made Champions in 2023 which is the exact same film, only without subtitles and ends thirty minutes quicker. Americans like to get to the point faster, it seems. The central theme of both these films is that -seen from a certain POV- none of the players are as life-challenged as the coach himself. This entire arrangement of mixed donut mental conditions exists entirely to get Gulshon to become a genuine human being himself. Obviously, the audience gets there sooner than the coach does. We have to. We see the challenges coming: the player who doesn’t shower, the player who can only shoot the ball by rotating with his back to the basket and launching the ball blindly behind him, the fashionista who “won’t wear red.” Gulshon will have to connect with the players on a personal level before he can get them to do literally anything on the basketball court.
And Gulshon doesn’t tolerate professional idiocy well; get a load of where he is now. These are games won by scores of 9-8. The film lets on that Gulshon even broke with his wife over
the issue of children [amateur engaged folks: you and your partner can disagree about literally anything else, but not children, politics, or religion. If any of those three are not compatible, you are headed for eventual divorce]. So, is coaching younger and intellectually challenged humans going to make Gulshon suddenly appreciate child-rearing? Yes, I’m guessing that is indeed the purpose of this exercise.
There’s a lot of cheap emotion in Sitaare Zameen Par (literally “Stars on Earth”). Yes, I’ll call it “cheap.” This is a every color-by-numbers film deliberately cast to play on emotion. I find most of the players not so much handicapped as “goofy.” Clearly, most of the players have no real intellectual challenge from the position of problem-solving or independent action; they’re just kinda odd and socially off-putting. The movie has deliberately selected the most socially acceptable among the socially awkward to generate our own automatic empathy. See how that works? And I feel the same way about Sitaare Zameen Par and I did about Champions – yes, this film will make you smile, often in spite of yourself. Yes, I grudgingly say it’s worth watching more than it isn’t. BUT, and DAMN IF YOU DON’T HAVE ME GOING HERE AGAIN, why, film, why on Earth -in this hemisphere or the other- why if you care about the outcome of the game would you ever give the ball to the guy who never passes and never makes a shot? That dude is an automatic turnover; and I feel your job as the coach is to, in the very least, teach him to pass the ball. That doesn’t seem like a tall ask for a guy who aspires to coach professionals.
There once was a coach named Aurora
Whose life was anything but a bore-a
For a DWI
The judge declared, “WHY?”
“I’m gonna make society even the score-a”
Not Rated, 155 Minutes
Director: R.S. Prasanna
Writer: Javier Fesser, David Marqués, Divy Nidhi Sharma
Genre: Learning things you didn’t know … kinda
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: SJWs
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Nazis
