By Hindustan Times
Movie: Paan Singh Tomar
Direction: Tigmanshu Dhulia
Actors: Irrfan, Mahie Gill
Rating: ***
There is an understated elegance about Irrfan (he dropped the last name Khan a while ago) in Paan Singh Tomar. He plays a countrywide level athlete who becomes a dreaded dacoit within the Chambal Valley. Tomar sprints over hurdles with breathtaking ease and finally displays the similar stubborn determination while murdering men who've robbed him of his ancestral land. Irrfan imbues Tomar with grace and a quiet dignity. So even if he meets the inevitable fate of a bandit and his body riddled with bullets, collapses into the dusty ground, there's something heroic about him.
Paan Singh Tomar is fiction inspired by true events. The tale is remarkable –Tomar is a military subedaar who gets into athletics only because sportsmen get more to eat. After a race, the very first thing he does is grab and devour a host of bananas. Tomar keeps his faith within the system and doesn’t resort to violence until a lethargic, blatantly corrupt cop refuses to register his complaint and instead asks Tomar, who has travelled abroad for sporting competitions, why foreigners wear such few clothes. Hurt and angry, Tomar wonders: Desh keliye faltu bhagey kya?
The moment has genuine pathos. As does Tomar’s wounded declaration to a journalist that despite being a seven-time National Games winner, he remained anonymous, while murder and kidnapping brought him fame. But despite the wealthy raw material and quality performances, Paan Singh Tomar doesn’t soar. Stretches of the screenplay are sluggish and strangely inert. More critically, I never got a way of what Tomar’s conversion from a military man to a murderer did to his psyche. Yes, he resorts to violence only because he's provoked but subsequently, he seems oddly relaxed along with his criminality. Director Tigmanshu Dhulia establishes a loving relationship between Tomar and his wife, Indra, played by Mahie Gill. But Indra and his two children largely disappear from his life when he becomes an outlaw and we never really see him ache for them.
Dhulia was a casting director on Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen. In interviews, he has said that he first heard about Paan Singh Tomar while engaged on that film and decided that some day he would make a movie on him. Tomar was a confrère of Phoolan Devi. Naturally then, we see one of the crucial same motifs – the spidery curves of the ravines that appear to swallow up the dacoits, their habit of announcing their presence on loudspeakers, a massacre that results in a police clampdown. But Paan Singh Tomar doesn’t sock you within the gut like Bandit Queen did, partly because not one of the supporting characters have enough flesh on them. The villains are especially non-descript, nasty but not menacing.
Paan Singh Tomar has good intentions but not enough emotional heft. I NEEDED to feel more. But what Dhulia and Irrfan do give us is an interesting character who was at once, complex and childlike. He makes it worth watching.
