Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal: notes and a nose
Didn’t think much of Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal; in fact I can’t remember the last time I found it so hard to sit through a film (no wait, that would be this one, which was even harder). However, the film was partly redeemed by the best scene involving a human nose since Woody Allen’s Sleeper.
Notes
– John Abraham’s character Sunny Bhasin, a cocky young football star, has one of the most persuasive lines in the film, though it’s a line the film itself doesn’t pay adequate attention to. “I play football, I don’t perform in a circus,†he snaps when asked to join a Southall club comprising various potbellied men who kick a ball around to prove that their sense of community, their “Hindustaniyatâ€Â, is intact despite their having left Hindustan years ago. (Now this sense of community is under threat because moneyed people want to build an entertainment park or something such on their beloved club ground. To deflect these plans, they must rapidly get their act together, hire a washed-up former player as a coach and rise up the ranks of the British football league; hence the film.)
But as it turns out, Sunny’s derisive “circus†is an apt description of this motley band of buffoons (who collectively go “YAYYY!†when they discover money sent by an anonymous benefactor and realise that there is one other person who believes in them), and the problem is that it remains an apt description despite their climb towards glory in the second half of the movie. Even the soppiest underdog-has-his-day film must reach for credibility at some point, but the transformation of these dawdlers to a league-topping side is never remotely believable.
At the heart of this story are some very simple-minded conceits: that the human spirit (in this case, the Hindustani spirit) can substitute for other deficiencies like basic incompetence (and potbellies) even in a sport as physically demanding as football; that sheer will to win (as if other teams aren’t equally determined) can override all the other factors that go into a sporting victory; that only the team we’re meant to be supporting responds to the thunderous pep talks delivered by its coach (inevitably a man with demons in his closet, trying to redeem himself) while the opposition is content to play supporting role on the big stage.
Now, to an extent, all inspirational sports movies have to engage with such simplifications. Even Chak De India, a much superior film to Goal, laboured at times to convince us that its team of underprivileged, faction-ridden Indian girls could win a world championship against the war-hardened, ruthlessly efficient Australians. But where Chak De succeeded was in the attention it paid to the staging of its sports sequences and in the behind-the-scenes training given to its actors, so that they at least looked like competent hockey players, and what we saw up there on the screen looked like a professional hockey match (it helped also that the climactic decider in that film was a tie-break, which is more about skill and strategy than brute force). In Goal, on the other hand, we never get a sense of the nuances of football, of strategies or manouevres – in fact, with some of the players in the Southall club, we never get the sense that they can do anything other than trot up to a ball and kick it at some point within the 0 to 180-degree arc in front of them. The result is akin to a slapstick National Lampoon feature (I don’t remember now whether there was a movie called National Lampoon’s Football Academy, though on this evidence there should have been) rather than to a rousing Remember the Titans-type film (which is what Goal was trying to be).
– It could still have been a very funny movie (unintentionally, that is) if it weren’t so loud, shrill and prolonged, and so reprehensibly manipulative in its depiction of racism. There’s the Aston Villa skinhead, a stand-in for the average Brit player who doesn’t want a south Asian on his team: he tells star player Sunny, “Go home, Paki.†(I’m still undecided whether Sunny gets offended by this because it’s a pejorative in general or because he doesn’t care to be mistaken for a Pakistani). There’s the Evil White Woman who wants to take over the Southall ground (personally, I thought she might put it to better use than we see the footballers doing) and who will eventually be forced to extend the lease, much the same way the British in Lagaan are forced to defer taxes for three years. The perpetually scheming, contemptuous look on this woman’s face and her frequent exclamations of “Shit!†when her diabolical plans are foiled are so overdone, it would be enough to make Lagaan’s Captain Russell break out into a hearty rendition of “Jana Gana Manaâ€Â, like the gora lad in Loins of Punjab Presents.
– When the whites do unsporting things on the field (e.g. faking a tumble to earn a penalty), they exchange meaningful looks, leer and perform high-fives – our cue to feel sorry for our persecuted desi heroes. Essentially, we’re in this strange zone where an Indian team is supposed to be competing on equal footing with tough foreigners, but at the same time we’re expected to shake our heads, cluck our tongues and feel wronged every time someone from the opposition shows a bit of the tough-guy spirit. It’s like the shameless, play-to-the-gallery scene in Lagaan where the little boy sent in as a runner for one of the players is caught backing up too far by the Brit bowler, who then runs him out: tears streaming down the kid’s face, expressions of disgust and betrayal on the faces of the villagers, and suddenly we aren’t playing a hard sport anymore, we’re just nurturing our victim mentality.
– But oh, just to balance things out, there’s a superfluous beach scene featuring skimpily dressed white women, thrown in to show us that goras can be put to some good use as well.
– I laughed out loud at the scene where Shaan (Arshad Warsi) says that Sunny’s playing for a British league team amounts to spitting in the plate that he’s eaten from (“jis thali se khaata hai, usi mein thookta haiâ€Â) – that’s a rich analogy coming from an Indian who voluntarily migrated to a foreign country and who has, by most accounts, had a good life there; he might want to rethink what the “thali†is in this case. I’m not getting into Tebbit Test territory here, but given the circumstances of these people’s lives, this “thali mein thook†business reeks of self-righteousness. As does Shaan’s remark, made in a different context, that “the British had all the guns and cannons, and yet we got them out of our country without even lifting a handâ€Â. (Right, right, and then you missed them so much that you migrated to their country a couple of decades later.)
The nose
– Thankfully, Goal does manage to be funny (unintentionally, of course) in parts, notably in an ending that extracts every possible drop of dramatic tension from the fate of – hold your breath – John Abraham’s nose. That’s right: while a match is on, a doctor checks an X-Ray and discovers that Sunny has a hairline fracture in his proboscis! The opposition team finds out and decides to cash in! (Because they’re evil racist goras!) They elbow him in the nose – once, twice! (They never get penalised, the referee is a racist gora too!) The nose gets the worst of the climactic goal too, calamity looms and there is a heart-stopping moment where we don’t know whether the felled Sunny will open his eyes again (except that he’s John Abraham, and Bipasha Basu is waiting in the wings, and this is a feel-good film, so we really do know, don’t we?).
If Goal had known it was a comedy at heart, it might have had the good sense to end with a shot of Sunny’s long-suffering nose ascending to heaven while the ghosts of football heroes past stand about in the clouds tossing marigolds at it and chanting “We dig John’s nose”. But no, it chooses instead to give this lame-brained subplot all the tragic resonance of Amitabh blowing himself up along with the bridge at the end of Sholay. Will the nose live to sniff another day? Of course it will, and if this film does well with NRI communities all over the world (who see in it their own lifetime struggles to preserve “Hindustaniyatâ€Â), who nose, there’ll probably be a sequel too.
P.S. John Abraham is probably the best thing about the film: the role suits him and he does the brattish grin-and-squint thing better than most other actors. (Bipasha is hardly there: the highlight of her role is a scene where she looks deep into his eyes and seductively whispers “Asshole” - much the same thing the film is doing to its audience all along.)
on Saturday, November 24th, 2007, 10:24 pm in Film, Sports › 
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Seriously, Indian filmmakers don’t have a friggin’ clue when it comes to British Indian lives, it’s embarassing.
((( Of course it will, and if this film does well with NRI communities all over the world (who see in it their own lifetime struggles to preserve “Hindustaniyat†)))
Seriously, this will be seen as emabrassing by British Indians, who live in a football culture and will probably cringe at the depictions of racism which are so crudely depicted in this movie, as well as the depictions of football. It’s not that racism doesn’t exist, it does, but not in the pantomine way it’s depicted here. And in terms of sports, the English FA and Premiership clubs are desperate for a ‘Monty Panesar’ to emerge from the Indian community and become a football star, thousands of British Indians follow their teams at stadiums every weekend. The understanding of the reality of British Indian life is risible. I also play in a Sunday league team, where whites, black and Indians play together, and England is no way as racist as it seems to be depicted here (at least in London), and I wish movie morons from Bombay would stop projecting their crude idiocies onto the British Indian experience.
Similarly, I did not like “I…Proud to Be an Indian”, and other movies along the same lines that ignore the personal responsibilities of immigrants based on the choices they’ve made. And John Abraham is bland and boring for the most part.
Hey Priya, I don’t mind throwing that kind of rhetoric back at racists who tell you you don’t belong —- at the end of the day, most British Indians are born in the UK and are not immigrants, it’s just that these Bombay filmmaker are halfwits when they try to make movies about British Indians, they are so clueless it’s unbelievable.
I just thought of anopther thing. If the Arshad Warsi character is portrayed as inimically holding back the John Abraham character from succeeding by playing the race-guilt card, isn’t that an implicit criticism of his stupidity? After all, the hero is John Abraham.
Oh dear, from what I’ve seen of this this looks atrocious - something like an extended version of that awful rugby scene in Namaste London. I agree, British-asians are long overdue a decent film about our experience - one that isn’t mired in crude stereotypes like the eeeevvil neonazi skinheads and the old vestiges of the Raj vs. the pure, goldenhearted desi hero. If we’re happy to run our businesses, educate our kids and root our lives here - yelping out ‘victim’ is absolutely hypocritical. But | think this will still do reasonably well with the NRI audience, because it does nurture this deluded self-righteous fantasy that many people still seem to entertain.
i was on this transatlantic flight on Jet and thought i’d look this up. it was either that or watch geriatrix’ shenanigans in cheeni kum after having wrapped up Honeymoon Ltd and Eklavya in my outbound. That rugby scene was really something else but rishi kapoor running around in shorts was quite worth the life that drained away.
may be. but it will also sit well with the IRI audience who have pretty wild idea about racism, crime and wantonness (I feel so Victorian) in the vvest. I looked over the profile of Screwvalla who’s behind the goal movie. I would be very surprised if he didnt use market research in making movie decisions. He seems too successful a moviemaker to not be coloring by numbers to meet his revenue targets. if he’s running this movie house like a business he probably has a pile of money he has to keep churning and he invests after understanding the revenue potential. the thing about india is, with a billion people, you can package shit, but if even one out of hundred buy that shit for ten bucks each, yo’re set. BTW screwvalla was also behind rang de basanti (arguably a much better movie).
sorry for the generally illiterate posts. i’m usually better than that.
I don’t think this will do well amongst a British Indian audience at all. To see your lives, culture, ambience and landscape depicted so moronically isn’t going to appeal. It will probably get an opening weekend for the novelty of seeing a movie set partly in Southall, but epictions of our lives like Amrish Puri feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square as if it was his front garden in Dilwale Dulhaniya is one thing, an idiotic fantasy like this is another thing altogether. A movie that tries to tackle themes of racism in sport and British society, in such an utterly clueless half wit fantasist way will be accurately laughed at as so risible. But I think khoofia is probably right, the issues its playing out are Indian, not British Indian (like as if anyone gives a f— about ‘Hindustaniyat’ in Southall, or acts out as if they are replaying colonialist revenge fantasies like half of these Bollywood morons do these days)
There are definitely issues and themes of British Indian identity and culture and racism, but exploring them in a context of a moronic film like this is laughable. Any such film that is worth anything that deals with these experiences will never come out of Bombay and those savants who make movies there, and half got a clue about British Indian lives and experience and only project their own inanities onto any story told in that context.
Loads of typos and spellings in my last post too. Note to self: you cannot speed type.
I don’t disagree at all Bobby, and I hope it does sink to the bottom of oblivion like the soggy dishcloth it is. A bunch of my kin have seen it at the weekend and did like it though (but their poor taste is infamous so perhaps not the best sample audience to judge from) - most of the older lot liked it, primarily I guess because it comfortably cushioned existing beliefs/prejudices, while the younger lot appreciated the eyecandy and, yep, the novelty of seeing something resembling themselves on the bollywood screen. Although the footy stuff was BS.
it’s a shame this film’ll be such twaddle, because these are worthwhile subjects to examine, but I guess any remotely authentic depiction of the british asian experience would be throttled at birth since it would risk destroying those nice, comfortable illusions it’s so often glossed over with.
I don’t think that cinema works especially well when it is didactic and like agit-prop either. I don’t see cinema as ideological and I don’t see anything wrong with popcorn and candyfloss that treads the comforting waters that its audience indulge in. I just want it to be done well, with a sense of internal coherence and truth. This type of film is just pathetic.
I mean, show me another one of those turgid finger-wagging AsianTV series, films or plays with a sociological lesson to hit you over the head with, written by hectoring mediocrities whose agenda is driven by some social issue, ideology, or ‘message’ to whack on the table of British Asians and I’ll scream. I detest that almost as much as I do this clueless ‘NRI’ witlessness.
I do agree that the proper place for the rhetoric is in the face of those who say “go home” or “you don’t belong here” and think films are a powerful way to do that. This is why I’m all the more resentful of movies like this, which perpetuate, as others have said, the ‘victim’ self-identification. Caricaturization for the sake of entertainment ultimately cheapens whatever genuine struggles exist and is just irresponsible.
What are some movies that properly depict the British Asian experience, btw?
obvious ones include east is east, bhaji on the beach, my beautiful laundrette…
there is also an excellent film with om puri(I think…) about immigrants in the 70s… cannot remember title though…
dirty pretty things is also great. though not about british asians, but illegal immigrants. but still fantastic :)
My Son the Fanatic?
Didn’t like Bhaji so much.
East is East?
also yasmin
and channel 4 did a mini series called britz - both are about contemporary british muslims and meant to look at the issue of ‘home-grown’ terrorists - yasmin does a better job of this though.
also anita and me - 70s immigrants again, I think. not bad, heartwarmy stuff (hate that word - makes me think of soup…) with meera syal.
no, the om puri one isn’t East is east… its some surreal little film I saw in the wee hours one night. Will try to find out.
Bhaji isn’t fantastic… but it was the first film I ever saw about brit-asians, so it was pretty cool.
The Om Puri film set in the 1960’s was ‘Brothers In Trouble’ adapted from the novel by Urdu writer Abdullah Hussein, directed by Uday Prasad who also directed ‘My Son the Fanatic’
http://imdb.com/title/tt0112586/
As it happens, I don’t like any of the movies made about British Asian life with any real passion. Gurinder Chadha’s movies are loathsome, Kureishi’s screenplays broke ground and deserve respect, but I always feel that there are lives and voices in the margins and shadows that are not being given expression.
British Asian films have been skewed in recent years more than ever towards the sociological examination of Muslim ‘alienation’ and factors surrounding Islamic extremism. We are strangled by this subject. We need freedom from the worthy and anthropological. Brick Lane is, you know, just such a worthy and self satisfied film. But it’s all so, meh, not this again.