Aamir Khan has changed the equation when it comes to box office numbers. The 51-year-old actor has proved, time and again, he’s a bigger star than Shah Rukh, and the most bankable.
During the physically gruelling Dangal shoot, Aamir Khan was, well, Aamir Khan. As fastidious as ever. For him, the quest for professional precision has always bordered on near-manic obsession. The pursuit of perfection turned even weightier in Dangal. Literally.
The star put on 30 kg to play a flabby, retired, forty-something wrestler. Once that part of the film was out of the way, he spent all of six months to reduce his body fat from 38 per cent to 9.67 per cent in order to get into the skin of a muscular 25year-old grappler. This he did without an extreme diet or steroids.
Aamir’s amazing double makeover – first from ‘fit to fat’, and then back to fighting fit – was an effort no less remarkable than the one that Matthew McConaughey made to shed nearly 50 pounds for his Oscar-winning role in Dallas Buyers Club.
“When a superstar invests so much passion and commitment in a film, half the battle is won,” Nitesh Tiwari, director of Dangal, has said. Indeed, Dangal wouldn’t have happened without the persnickety actor’s famed, but often poohpoohed single-mindedness.
By the time Dangal came off the film editor’s studio, it was primed for emotional and dramatic impact. It had ‘megahit’ written all over it. With so much time and effort going into its making, could the story have been any different?
Among Bollywood fans, anticipation was high, as was the fear of being let down. But Dangal hit the ground running and did not slow down until all box-office records had been smashed.
Amid all the commercial success that it has enjoyed, the film has been criticised, and not entirely unfairly, by some for promoting patriarchy in the guise of pushing the women’s empowerment envelope. Dangal is after all the story of a Haryanvi wrestler who slave-drives his daughters into taking up the sport with the aim to make amends for his own unfulfilled dreams.
Dangal has also been accused of taking liberties with fact to inject overt drama into the real-life tale of Mahavir Singh Phogat, who was forced by circumstances to cut his sporting career short. This misgiving, too, is understandable, but, to their credit, the makers of Dangal made no bones about what they are seeking to achieve. They inserted an upfront rider admitting that they had altered the ‘true’ story for the purpose of heightened drama.
But whatever else it might lack, Dangal isn’t wanting one bit on the empathygeneration front. Without taking recourse to conventional Bollywood tropes, it draws the audience into the riveting battle that Mahavir Singh Phogat and his daughters wage against entrenched gender prejudice. All through their trials and tribulations, the audience cares for them, roots for them, and eggs them on.
Bollywood sports films are usually an embarrassment. They are given to indiscriminate formulaic excesses that undermine realism and do no justice to the sport they seek to celebrate.
Dangal stands head and shoulders above the field owing primarily to the unwavering authenticity of its wrestling scenes. It is, of course, no fluke that they don’t look amateurish and fake. It is the result of months of blood, sweat and pain that the cast endured to get the nuances of the tough contact sport right.
National women’s wrestling coach Kripa Shankar Bishnoi, an Arjuna awardee, was roped in to help actresses Fatima Sana Sheikh and Sanya Malhotra to ease themselves into the intricacies of wrestling. Even Zaira Wasim, who plays the younger Geeta Phogat in the film, overcame the limitations of her slight frame and pulled off the most difficult of moves on the screen.
Dangal was two years in the making and it took a lot out of not only Aamir but also the four young actresses who were part of the principal cast of the film.
The girls, especially Fatima, who plays the older Geeta Phogat, were put through a punishing training schedule so that they would look and move like real Olympiclevel wrestlers. They trained for eight to nine months, hitting the wrestling arena six days of the week without let.
Sanya Malhotra, a ballerina who plays the older Babita, has spoken of how she hid injuries sustained during training for fear that she might lose the role to somebody else.
The sacrifices the girl made paid off big time. Within a week of the release of Dangal, Fatima, Zaira and Sanya had burnt themselves into the collective consciousness of the nation much in the manner that the actresses who made up the women’s hockey team in Chak De India did some years ago.
The defining quality of an Aamir Khan film is the space that he willingly allows his co-actors to hog. While he provides the star power that propels a cinematic project, he has the acumen to let the screenplay dictate his overall strategy. He draws himself away from the spotlight as and when required and permits his co-actors to make their presence felt.
From Lagaan to Rang De Basanti, from Taare Zameen Par to 3 Idiots, that is how Aamir has played the game. So Dangal is as much Mahavir’s story as it is Geeta’s tale.
Producers and directors who have worked with Aamir never tire of narrating stories about how acutely aware he is of the needs of a film and its target audience. He often brings to the table ideas and approaches of his own and they only add value to the final product.
His commitment to a project tends to border on the preternatural, as both Rajkumar Hirani, director of PK, and Tiwari will happily vouch. That Dangal and PK today sit atop the most successful Bollywood blockbusters of all time has made his intuition so sought-after.
Tiwari had suggested that the star should film the younger, fitter portions of the Mahavir Singh Phogat story first, but Aamir talked him into beginning the shoot with scenes featuring the former wrestler’s ageing, potbellied persona, which constitutes 80 per cent of Dangal.
Aamir’s logic stemmed from a practical, personal motive. “Had I put on weight for the second part of the shoot, I would have had no reason to get back into shape after the completion of the film,” he says.
He drove himself and his physical trainer Rahul Bhatt (Mahesh Bhatt’s son who was a child hanging around the sets when the director made Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahi with Aamir in the early 1990s) round the bend as he worked to get the body type of a young wrestler.
Dangal was just the kind of creative and physical challenge that a Bollywood star who does not shy away from pushing himself beyond endurance would have relished. The thrill of achievement shows on the screen.
What the director and the lead actor, aided by an able cast, crew and support staff, eventually put into distribution has quickly turned into stuff that legends are made of, a dangal in which the winner takes all, and then some.