In what way can one add drama to a true story without drowning it in dated melodrama that would fit in well in a 1960s sitcom? This issue was present in Sudha Kongara’s Suriya-starring film “Soorarai Pottru,” which tells the story of the founding of India’s first low-cost airline. The same issue exists in the Hindi version of the film, which features Akshay Kumar.
A “ladki-wala” group arrives to “see” Vir Mhatre (Akshay Kumar) in the film’s opening scene, which takes place in a Maharashtra hamlet based on the actual Tamil Nadu village. Very quickly, the fact of Vir being much older than the potential bride Rani (Radhika Madan) is stated up front, just so we won’t cringe at seeing this couple cosying up, as also that that both are ‘sarfira’ in their own ways: he wants to open his own airline, at Udipi joint price points, so that every Indian can fly; she wants to start her own bakery.
From this point on, you will witness the two main narrative threads of the film: the intensely emotional scenes (Vir’s mother sobbing, Vir’s father yelling), and the comparatively subdued scenes where aviation magnate Paresh Goswami (Paresh Rawal) puts up one obstacle after another in Vir’s path as he transitions to full-time entrepreneurship with all of its complexities. When you have nothing, how do you reach the stars?
Suriya made some cute moments in the original film with his vivacious girlfriend who takes her time saying yes to him. Here, it’s hard to look past the clear age-difference between the two, and this happens not just in Akshay’s scenes with Radhika Madan, but with his two partners, Army mates who were an intrinsic part of the team which finally launched Deccan Air. He looks older than everyone else around him, except when he is facing off with his chief adversary Paresh Rawal, who manages to come off every bit as vile and classist-casteist in this reprise as he was in the original.
Though you wish she would quit talking behind her teeth, Madan does a decent job as an independent-minded Marathi mulgi who can impart some wisdom to her elderly grandpa. The writer also makes sure to include her in as many scenes as possible. However, “Sarfira” falls short when it comes to the two individuals who were his closest allies and partners throughout the airline’s founding; they are largely ignored until the very end, when they finally make an appearance. As Akshay’s mother, the superb Seema Biswas is reduced to a sobbing Bollywood maa; Belawadi is appropriately greasy, but after his brief arc, he is completely forgotten.
This is what occurs when a movie prioritises showcasing its lead actor. Not that Akshay Kumar, who appears in almost every frame of the movie, is intentionally bad, but there isn’t really much in this movie that he hasn’t done before. Akshay is back in the role of Akshay the Everyman who can fix everything, whether he is battling for the rights of his beloved villagers (who came up with that awful hairstyle?), defying his strict Army superior, or “maro-ing thumkas” with Madan (no, we’re not ageist, but we can’t help but cringe at the obvious age difference).
Like in the original, the most endearing scenes in the movie are when the common people emerge off the first trip with glowing, cheery grins. That’s what you learn from this informal translation of Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey, the book by G R Gopinath, and from the freeze frames of Gopinath and his fellow pioneers who took an impossible concept and made it come true.
