Gunjan Saxena | Reviews and Discussions ONLY - Page 2

3.5⭐

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Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl On Netflix Isn’t Startlingly Innovative But Is High On Impact

This is one of those films in which you are keenly aware that your buttons are being pushed but it’s done so artfully that you relish the experience

• POSTED ONAUGUST 10, 2020
• 4 MINUTE READ
• BY ANUPAMA CHOPRA

Director: Sharan Sharma
Writers: Sharan Sharma, Nikhil Mehrotra
Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Vineet Kumar Singh, Manav Vij, Angad Bedi
Cinematographer: Manush Nandan
Editor: Nitin Baid
Streaming on: Netflix

The phrase “the sky is the limit” was perhaps created for Gunjan Saxena, India’s first female Air Force pilot to go into combat duty. She was only 24 when she put her life on the line in the Kargil War, carrying out over 40 missions. But her battle started much earlier, when as a little girl, she decided that she wanted to fly. She fought with her family, with Air Force officers who couldn’t wrap their heads around a female pilot, with patriarchy so deeply entrenched in the system that there weren’t even separate bathrooms for women. Gunjan Saxena is a soldier and a pioneer. Hers is an incredible story that seamlessly blends emancipation, valor, duty and patriotism.

Which makes it rich fodder for film. Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl begins with a disclaimer that this is a dramatized version of the events of the flight lieutenant’s life with no claims of authenticity. Once again, we are in the treacherous terrain between fact and fiction. But debutant director Sharan Sharma and his co-writer Nikhil Mehrotra take advantage of this hybrid material to create a saga that isn’t startlingly innovative but high on impact. This is one of those films in which you are keenly aware that your buttons are being pushed but it’s done so artfully that you relish the experience. Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl might remind you of Uyare, the wonderful Malayalam film, also about a girl who loved flying, or the Hollywood film, Hidden Figures, about women who forge a path at the male-dominated NASA, but this is a full-blown, homegrown Hindi drama. I will admit that I wept copiously.

Also Read: I Got Trolled For Liking The Gunjan Saxena Trailer. Here’s Why That’s A Problem

The storytelling might not be sophisticated or subtle but it’s enormously satisfying. Take the opening, which thrusts us into a precarious situation in Kargil. Soldiers are injured and must be rescued. As Gunjan runs to her helicopter in slow motion with her hair in a bun, I found myself getting a little teary. It’s the kind of introduction usually reserved for heroes. The film had just begun but I was already rooting for this young girl who is rushing headlong into danger.

The Kargil War bookends Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl. Most of the story is about Gunjan fighting all odds to fulfil her dream of flying. Which is wise because the war portions aren’t as strong as the rest of the film. The soaring helicopter shots, choreographed by Hollywood aerial coordinator Marc Wolff, give the film scale but the actual battle is spatially confusing and feels hurriedly staged. This film isn’t about Uri-style action. It rides on the strength of the human story.

The storytelling might not be sophisticated or subtle but it’s enormously satisfying

Which is what Sharan and Nikhil ace. Nikhil seems to have become Hindi cinema’s specialist for women empowerment narratives – his other projects include Panga and Dangal. Like in those films, here too, he and Sharan create three-dimensional characters whose struggles are relatable – from the warm and wise supportive father to the loving but chauvinistic brother who learns to value his sister’s dreams, to the affectionate but disapproving mother who wishes that Gunjan would remain within the boundaries ascribed to women.

The film is anchored by the relationship between Gunjan and her father, Anup, played with minimal fuss by Pankaj Tripathi. Here is an actor who never seems to be acting. As Anup, Pankaj radiates humanity, which makes him the right person to deliver the key message of the film – that the many shackles society puts on women are a cage which must be broken. Pankaj says this with such compassionate insistence that Gunjan has no option but to listen. Anup is closer to Jassie Gill’s Prashant Sachdeva, the caring husband in Panga than Aamir Khan’s Mahavir Singh Phogat in Dangal. Anup is a gentle but firm cheerleader. He’s the father every girl deserves.

Thankfully, in Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, the messaging doesn’t get in the way of the movie

Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl demands a lot from Janhvi Kapoor, who is only one feature film old. Over the course of the film, Gunjan ages from a schoolgirl to a young woman. Janhvi is practically in every frame. There are stray scenes in which you sense that she is faltering but mostly, she holds her own against far more experienced actors, among them Vineet Kumar Singh, Manav Vij and Angad Bedi who does well as Gunjan’s brother. Janhvi’s youth and vulnerability serves the character. Her sincerity and determination see her through even the tougher moments. Watch her climactic scene with her brother and the range of emotions that cross her face as he speaks to her. She nails each one. Vineet, as Gunjan’s superior who gaslights her at every opportunity, is also solid.

The music by Amit Trivedi doesn’t infuse much into the story, apart from the plaintive ‘Dori Tutt Gaiyaan’, sung by Rekha Bhardwaj and written by Kausar Munir. The song unabashedly tugs at your heartstrings. But I think the film could’ve done without the on-the-nose ‘Bharat ki Beti’. The song plays as the end credits roll by which time the film’s message does not need further underlining.

But perhaps that’s not true. Perhaps in a country like ours, there can’t be enough messaging around women.

And thankfully, in Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, the messaging doesn’t get in the way of the movie.

You can watch the film on Netflix.

Gunjan Saxena Starring Janhvi Kapoor Is A Potent Biopic That Juxtaposes Passion With Legacy

Most biographical dramas present their subjects as people who behave like they know a film will be made about them one day. But that’s where director Sharan Sharma’s crafty biopic triumphs.

• POSTED ONAUGUST 10, 2020
• 5 MINUTE READ
• BY RAHUL DESAI

Director: Sharan Sharma
Writers: Nikhil Mehrotra, Sharan Sharma
Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Angad Bedi, Manav Vij, Vineet Kumar Singh
Cinematographer: Manush Nandan
Editor: Nitin Baid
Streaming on: Netflix

Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl has one of the cheekiest hero-foreshadowing sequences in Hindi cinema. The film opens with a group of Indian soldiers cautiously wading through a Kargil valley. Wartime nerves lead to boyish banter. One of them cracks a joke about an empty gun and a colleague’s wife. The grinning men are instantly chastised by the squad leader. The casually sexist joke being snubbed is the social equivalent of a rousing superhero theme – seconds later, the Indian Air Force’s first female combat pilot, Gunjan Saxena, is dispatched to rescue them from an enemy attack. This scene ties into her arrival at an all-male IAF base, where we see a wry leader (Vineet Kumar Singh) tearing up his officers’ racy Pamela Anderson posters before we see her. In short, her journey has come full circle. But the film barely registers the Kargil moment – perhaps because its protagonist, too, never really set out to achieve narrative closure.

Most biographical dramas present their subjects as people who behave like they know a film will be made about them one day. These characters display their effect on history in real time; they are already aware of how their extraordinary presence will be viewed decades later. For instance, we saw Shakuntala Devi deliver feminist lines as a child itself; every other scene became an extravagant lesson in gender equality. But the triumph of director Sharan Sharma’s crafty biopic lies in how it reveals Gunjan Saxena as someone whose legacy is an incidental consequence of her individualism. She is more of a dreamer than a public metaphor. She never says things like “I want to touch the sky” or “Red Bull gives you wings”. The music says it (“Bharat ki beti”), the treatment says it (slow-claps), her progressive father says it (“shatter the cage and fly away”), but her tender age (she’s 24 in Kargil) prevents her from being a mouthpiece. More importantly, her goal is hers. When a family member salutes her with a “Jai Hind,” she responds with a hug. When she airlifts the injured, it’s less duty and more instinct. Gunjan wants to be a pilot, and flying – both literally and figuratively – is the story that history writes for her; flying is merely a byproduct of her ambition.

The film about her dissolves the umbilical cord that connects masculinity to chest-beating patriotism. But it does so through a person who stays true to herself, not a character who aims to be a woke symbol of change. In the end, you believe that she’s still the same spellbound little girl who was invited into an airline cockpit by friendly pilots in aviator sunglasses. In the end, flying is not so much her identity and livelihood as it is still her passion. Consequently, Janhvi Kapoor is an inspired choice to play Gunjan Saxena. Her pitch-perfect turn is no fluke. There’s of course her unassuming physicality: the fragile face, the stoic voice, the adolescent waking-up-to-life gaze. But there’s also the fact that Kapoor, too, is at a nascent stage of her career. Her focus on excelling as a performer in a film rather than as an actress doing a “woman-oriented” role – as an individual rather than a legacy – naturally feeds the character arc. Kapoor’s film heritage mirrors Saxena’s army family. Which is why it may initially seem gimmicky that Gunjan Saxena mixes the two worlds.

The biopic is ripe with ‘90s Bollywood references. Early on, a teenage Gunjan is tense after her board exam results. She’s fared too well. In a playful ode to Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, she comes home to discover a party in her honour – a confession, too, plays out in a dramatic family scene behind closed doors. (Bonus: a famous Anil Kapoor song headlines the scene). Soon, her father cites Rekha’s 15-kg weight loss for a movie role to inspire Gunjan. During her selection interview, when asked to speak about “current events,” she mentions a controversial Govinda song and the Hum Aapke Hain Koun dog, Tuffy. Her best friend is an aspiring actress who tries her luck in Bombay. Her “rival” at the training base is named Shekhar, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar’s villain. Even her introduction scene, featuring her feet running in slow-motion towards a helicopter, is a mild hat-tip to Shah Rukh Khan’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham entry.

Yet, Gunjan Saxena is a rare Dharma movie in which none of these elements are token homages. It helps frame Gunjan as a dreamer, yes, but the political incorrectness of ‘90s Hindi cinema also shapes her setting: an era in which people are yet to grasp that misogyny and jingoism are abnormal traits. Her brother mimicking an air-hostess to mock her pilot dreams, then, feels typical. This in turn makes Gunjan misinterpret her own sincerity as selfishness – an inability to respect the norm. It also lends an urgency and rawness to her monologue about nakli mardaangi (fake masculinity) to the male cadets. She rants like a ‘90s girl beaten down by a harsh truth, not a crowd-pleasing character voicing a 2020 film’s sensibilities.

The screenplay does a terrific job of fleshing out her personality with an eye on public perception. The film’s best scenes feature a young Gunjan doubting her own motivations. At one point, she wonders aloud to her father: Is she a “traitor” for using the Indian Air Force as a device to become a pilot? The father’s reply is exquisitely worded – a rap on the saffron knuckles of nationalism (“do you think IAF admits those who shout “Bharat Mata ki Jai” the loudest?), but also a gentle reminder that patriotism at its core is the glamorous sibling of humanity. That greatness is the good-looking partner of functionality.

The late Farooq Sheikh’s father-son scene in Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani came to mind: Be selfish, but be good at being selfish. In Pankaj Tripathi’s measured voice, these words also sound more like a discourse on the film’s merits. In a way, they sound like an ode to Janhvi Kapoor’s deceptively private performance, or the narrative’s lightness of touch over status-heavy storytelling. They frame war as an intimate trial by fire rather than a violent clash of egos. And they subvert our sense of space. His words educate her at the dining table and in the kitchen, the two areas of a house traditionally equated with Indian womanhood. Gunjan Saxena adds a helicopter cockpit to that list. Flying might be the book that history writes for her, but it’s also a chapter in her personal diary.

Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl Movie Review: Spry Biopic Flies Light With Passably Steady Janhvi Kapoor

Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl Movie Review: Pankaj Tripathi's natural, low-key, conversational tone serves as the spine of the drama. Angad Bedi, Vineet Kumar Singh and Manav Vij are perfectly in tune with the low-throttle film.

EntertainmentWritten by Saibal ChatterjeeUpdated: August 10, 2020 1:19 pm IST

by Taboola

Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl Review: A still from the film. (Image courtesy: janhvikapoor )

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Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Angad Bedi, Vineet Kumar

Director: Sharan Sharma

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Two wars unfold in Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl. The one on the India-Pakistan border leads the film to its climax; the other rages on the gender divide frontline practically all the way through. Both push the titular heroine to the brink as she fights to find her feet in a male preserve. But she hangs in there, propelled by her willpower and a father who helps her keep the headwinds at bay.

The spry biopic, bolstered by a brilliant Pankaj Tripathi and a passably steady Janhvi Kapoor, flies light. It adopts an unfussy approach to the two-pronged real-life drama that drives home the magnitude of the struggle of India's first female combat pilot. It is the 1990s. Gunjan Saxena is a middle-class Lucknow girl who aspires to be a commercial pilot. She gravitates towards the Indian Air Force. Her battle is as much about soaring above the mundane as about holding her ground. Neither is a cakewalk.

Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl, a Netflix original film scripted by Dangal co-writer Nikhil Mehrotra and directed by debutant Sharan Sharma, is definitely one of the better true stories to emerge from excess-prone Bollywood. Its take-offs are smooth and its landings steady. It averts overplaying its hand as it delineates the big and small conflicts in the protagonist's life. It rings emotionally true.

Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl distils all the drama that it can out of a career that in reality was a probably a painstaking grind. Gunjan Saxena (Janhvi Kapoor) was after all flying in the face of decades of prejudice and breaking new ground.

Every key sequence has some manner of conflict - and, of course, the heroine's dream - at its heart. This enables the unusually subdued reenactment of Flight Lieutenant Gunjan Saxena's life - the narrative spans 15 years, from 1984 to 1999, the year the Kargil War erupted - to highlight her fight against outright hostility and soul-crushing condescension without having to scramble for effect at the business end of the film.

In Scene One, nine-year-old Gunjan (played by Riva Arora) pleads for the window seat on a passenger flight but her drowsy elder brother (Aryan Arora) refuses to vacate it. An airhostess escorts the girl to the cockpit so that she can see the open sky. Later in the film, exasperated by the treatment the boys at the Udhampur Air Force Station subject her to, Gunjan nearly turns her back on her career. Her father, Lieutenant Colonel Anup Saxena (Pankaj Tripathi), steps in to guide her out of the trough.

Gunjan gets nothing on a platter. Whether she applies for a seat in a flying school, seeks to break into the Air Force or ease herself into a job that no woman has done before, she faces obstacles and delays. The Air Force base where she is sent does not have a ladies' room nor a private space where she can change into her overalls before a sortie. The more vital scenes, which play out within limited spans and serve specific purposes, contain hints of a way forward.

Resistance begins at home for Gunjan and then takes on dispiriting dimensions in the world outside. Her mother (Ayesha Raza Mishra) hopes that her daughter will one day outgrow her obsession with flying and go to college and acquire a conventional degree. Gunjan's well-meaning but casually sexist brother, Anshuman Saxena (Angad Bedi), who is also a soldier, tries everything he can to deflect her from her chosen path.

Dada, I want to be pilot, Gunjan, still a child, says at the breakfast table. Her elder brother's riposte reflects his conditioned thinking. I want to be Kapil Dev, he jokes, adding that girls do not become pilots. You can only be a cabin crew-member, he tells his sister dismissively. Her role as a girl is constantly defined for Gunjan. An instructor at the Air Force Academy barks at her: Air Force join karna hai toh fauji banke dikhao warna ghar jaake belan chalao (If you want to join the Air Force prove that you are a soldier or else go home and take care of the kitchen).

The belan (rolling pin) is a metaphor that surfaces tangentially in a subsequent 'turning point' scene in which her father challenges her to show him that she can make parathas when Gunjan suggests that she wants out. This sequence instantly establishes what kind of man her dad is - while he himself is fully equipped to rustle up parathas if need be, he talks his daughter out of the temptation to abandon her dreams and "settle down".

The film may be faulted on two counts. One, some of the scenes at the Udhampur IAF station, where a bunch of boys led by Wing Commander Dileep Singh (Vineet Kumar Singh) makes life difficult for the newbie, are not as subtle as the conversations in the Saxena household. And two, the protagonist is never allowed to fly 'solo'. She needs men to help her tide over the challenges thrown at her - besides her ever-supportive father, who stands behind her like a rock, there is Commanding Officer Gautam Sinha (Manav Vij), who spots the spark in Gunjan and stands up for her when the wind isn't blowing in her favour.

It is another matter that the paterfamilias (as interpreted by a delightfully on the nose Pankaj Tripathi) contributes the most in lending Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl its distinctively subdued feel. At first flush, it might be a tad difficult to accept Tripathi as an Army officer. It however takes the exceptionally gifted actor next to no time to sink his teeth into the role and dispel any misgivings the audience might have regarding his suitability for the role.

Tripathi's natural, low-key, conversational tone, which he sustains all through the film, serves as the spine of the drama. He is the sounding board for Janhvi Kapoor, who at times struggles to find the right median. The screenplay demands too much from her by way of emotive range. The actress is as old as the onscreen character she plays and that stands her in good stead.

Barring one shrill confrontation scene (she blows her top at the male pilots for partying late into the night and disturbing her sleep after she has been publicly humiliated for the umpteenth time earlier in the day) she stays within a limited bandwidth. She is at once an ingenue and a resolute girl, both wide-eyed and single-minded, and generally relatable.

Angad Bedi, Vineet Kumar Singh (in a special appearance) and Manav Vij are perfectly in tune with the low-throttle film. Ayesha Raza Mishra is terrific as the mother who frets over her daughter's choices but is acutely aware of the cost of frittering away opportunities. Wish the film had room for more of her.

Bollywood biopics have the tendency to turn into overheated fiction. This ne does not. The reason is tucked unobtrusively into the text of the film. In one key scene, Gunjan admits that she is joining the Air Force only because she loves flying and not owing to a patriotic urge. "I hope I'm not being a traitor in trying to fulfil my dream," she asks her dad. The Air Force, the Lieutenant Colonel sagely replies, doesn't need cadets who shout Bharat Mata ki jai but passionate personnel who do their jobs with honesty.

Gunjan Saxena - The Kargil Girl spares us the spectacle of ungainly chest-thumping. What it gives us instead, and without too much showy flapping of the wings, is a good old touching tale of a girl who dared to break free from her cage and fly away - a heroine we can cheer without resorting to a blood-curdling war cry.

Gunjan Saxena The Kargil Girl review: A mixed bag

Janhvi Kapoor does get better as she goes along, but performance-wise, she is still clearly a work-in-progress. She was excellent in her small part in Ghost Stories, and going by that, I was expecting more.

Written by Shubhra Gupta | Updated: August 10, 2020 12:52:13 pm

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Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl will premiere on Netflix on August 12.

Gunjan Saxena The Kargil Girl movie cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Vineet Kumar Singh, Angad Bedi, Manav Vij
Gunjan Saxena The Kargil Girl movie director: Sharan Sharma
Gunjan Saxena The Kargil Girl movie rating: Two and a half stars

The story of the first Indian Air Force woman pilot who was part of the 1999 Kargil conflict is ready-made movie material, and a great hook: who is Gunjan Saxena, and what made her want to fly so bad that she braved concerted antagonism in a tough male-dominated field?

The Lucknow-born Saxena, played by Janhvi Kapoor, is sky-struck from an early age, fighting for a window seat with her older brother (Bedi) during a flight, pulling away from the conventional route of good girls getting a degree-and-getting married, and being buoyed by a supportive father (Tripathi), in her determination to become a pilot.

We know that the real Flt Lt Saxena, who retired as Squadron Leader in 2004 as permanent commission was not available at the time, was on board with the creation of her reel version. So authenticity, whether it is the technical stuff Gunjan has to learn, or the military terminology she has to master when she gets to the Udhampur airbase, just ahead of the Kargil ‘war’ breaking out, is not so much an issue. The film was always going to be judged on whether Kapoor is able to carry off the author-backed role, and whether the film soars.

On both those counts, Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl is a mixed bag. What’s nice is the restraint, and lack of fuss with which the film is done. Trumpets don’t blast our ears every time there’s a sortie, even though Gunjan does get her backlit ‘Top Gun’ moment, as she strides out to the field from the hangar, uniformed and ready to go. The difficulty of being a lone female amongst a bunch of young men, bristling under the pressure of having to salute a woman, or having to watch their tongue, is all there. But staying away from high-pitch shouldn’t come off as lack of drama: even as the film follows its required beats, with Gunjan struggling against the standard ‘fauji’ what-are-women-doing-here misogyny, training and finally being able to take off, fighting off the enemy and rescuing injured colleagues, it stays a tad too sedate. We see Gunjan flying into peril, but our hearts are never in our mouths.

As for Kapoor, she does get better as she goes along, but performance-wise, she is still clearly a work-in-progress. She was excellent in her small part in Ghost Stories, and going by that, I was expecting more. In a smart move, there’s no visible pancake, and the flyaway hair and uniform worn as one, not a tightly-clinched costume, makes her look real. She is the unmade-up lodestar around which the film and its characters revolve, and the supporting cast is solid, even if defined only by what it can do for Gunjan. Tripathi, as the real wind beneath her wings, is too good an actor to be hidden, but everyone else, including Bedi who is given clunky lines around worrying about ‘Gunjan’s ‘suraksha’, Vij, as a senior officer who backs her, or Vineet Kumar Singh, a co-pilot who moves from hostility to like, could have been written with more depth, and flavour.

The best part though, and for which the film truly deserves a medal, is its choosing to steer clear of chest-thumping, flag-waving, ugly jingoism. In a throwaway line, the girl who wanted to be pilot says: I only want to fly. Could the film have been better? Undoubtedly. Women following their dreams against patriarchal odds? Absolutely.

‘Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl’ review: Earthbound despite dreams of flight

5 min read . Updated: 10 Aug 2020, 12:50 PM ISTUday Bhatia

Sharan Sharma’s polite, placid film stars Janhvi Kapoor as Gunjan Saxena, air force helicopter pilot and hero in the Kargil War

On the heels of Shakuntala Devi comes another literal-minded biopic. But where Anu Menon’s film muddied its emotional waters and switched around its timelines, Sharan Sharma’s Gunjan Saxena tells a simple and more or less linear story. After opening with Gunjan (Janhvi Kapoor) on her first mission during the 1999 Kargil War, the film loops back to the start and maps a straight line from her childhood dreams of becoming a commercial pilot to her joining the air force to being one of the first two Indian women to pilot a helicopter in combat. This uncomplicated approach seems to mirror the film’s view of its central character, who isn’t shown as exceptional, only exceptionally determined.

When Gunjan is taken into the cockpit of the flight she’s on by a kindly stewardess, it sparks an all-consuming desire in her to become a pilot. Her older brother, Anshuman, tells her girls can’t do that, but her father (Pankaj Tripathi) is encouraging. When she’s old enough, she applies to flying school, but is told she needs to finish 12th grade first. Two years later, she re-applies—and finds out she needs to graduate from college. Three years later, she meets all the requirements but doesn’t know the fees have increased to the point that her family can’t afford it.

This passage—played for laughs, with the same sad-sack clerk disappointing her every time—is an example of how a realistic film must decide whether it can stretch credulity in order to have a little fun. It seems altogether unlikely that Gunjan would be this uninformed about the means to achieving her one ambition in life—so uninformed that she’d repeatedly turn up without finding out the rules of admission. But there’s no mulling over lost opportunities, as the film immediately offers her another chance to fly. Her father suggests she joins the air force and, despite the misgivings of Anshuman (Angad Bedi), who’s now in the army, and her mother, who wants her to “settle", she applies, joins the academy and successfully completes training.

Gunjan finds her brother’s scepticism mirrored and magnified once she becomes an officer. As the first woman on the base, she’s ostracized and condescended to by her fellow officers. She misses her flight training several times as there isn’t a women’s bathroom and she has nowhere to change—an idea seemingly lifted from Hidden Figures, a film about the first female African-American mathematicians at NASA. This passage should be the film’s heart but is hampered by the lack of subtlety and wit. When Gunjan tries to talk to a group of officers at a party, they walk away from her one by one—a scene that would have seemed stagey in the 1950s. “What if there's an emergency and she starts crying?" a captain asks in another scene, trying to get out of flying with her.

This is not a film interested in people as complex beings. Instead, it deploys each character either as an outright detractor or cheerleader for Gunjan. Her father is unconditionally supportive, while her brother remains dismissive of her even after she becomes an officer. All the men on the base keep her at arm’s length; not one of them is shown as vaguely sympathetic. Flight commander Dileep Singh (Vineet Kumar Singh) deliberately keeps her from logging flying hours. Only the commanding officer (Manav Vij) recognises her potential, but instead of ordering Dileep Singh and the rest to do their job, he takes her training on himself. Yet, there's a politeness to the discrimination, as if the makers didn't want to make the armed forces look too close-minded.

Kapoor gives a quiet, unassuming performance. There’s a softness to it that skirts military clichés, but not enough steel when the film calls it. Variation is a problem as well—there isn't much that separates Kapoor’s disappointed face from her angry face from her game face. Her big outburst, when it finally comes, gives the impression of lines learnt and carefully delivered and not someone driven to desperate, career-threatening anger. There’s not much Bedi or Vineet Singh can do to make their one-note sexist characters interesting. It falls to Tripathi to elevate the film, which he does with gentleness and humour. It’s an atypical portrait of a former army man: mild-mannered, loosely strung, someone who registers protest not by barking orders but by getting up from the table in the middle of a meal, saying he’d planned to eat light anyway.

Kargil comes later in the film than I expected. Gunjan, having never flown a combat mission before, finds herself at the centre of a dangerous helicopter rescue, with an Indian Army platoon stranded and under fire. The sequence, filmed in Georgia, lasts only 8 minutes, a rather small amount of time to dedicate to the film’s most dramatic incident (and only war scene). It feels hurried and truncated and not entirely convincing, especially with the memory of Uri’s exceptional action scenes still fresh (also, someone forgot to remove the text saying "Great Battles"—an NDTV episode on the war aired in 2006—from the Kargil footage playing on TV).

Uri, too, had at its centre an army family—Vicky Kaushal’s major, his late father and brother-in-law. The rhythms of that household are essentially militaristic: talk of service and duty, clipped speech, emotions held in reserve. The Saxena family, on the other hand, could be mistaken for any civilian household. Given the surfeit of aggressive patriotism in recent Hindi films, it’s interesting to see Sharma and co-writer Nikhil Mehrotra hold back in this regard. My favourite scene is when Gunjan admits to her father, the night before she leaves home for her training, that she doesn’t want to be in the armed forces out of a desire to serve her country: she just wants to fly. His reply is telling. “Do you think the air force wants people who yell Bharat mata ki jai?" To see a Hindi film dial down rhetoric these days feels downright subversive.

'Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl' will stream on Netflix from 12 August.

https://twitter.com/taran_adarsh/status/1292748098045767680

Originally posted by: HakunaMatata.

Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl On Netflix Isn’t Startlingly Innovative But Is High On Impact

This is one of those films in which you are keenly aware that your buttons are being pushed but it’s done so artfully that you relish the experience

• POSTED ONAUGUST 10, 2020
• 4 MINUTE READ
• BY ANUPAMA CHOPRA.

Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl demands a lot from Janhvi Kapoor, who is only one feature film old. Over the course of the film, Gunjan ages from a schoolgirl to a young woman. Janhvi is practically in every frame. There are stray scenes in which you sense that she is faltering but mostly, she holds her own against far more experienced actors, among them Vineet Kumar Singh, Manav Vij and Angad Bedi who does well as Gunjan’s brother. Janhvi’s youth and vulnerability serves the character. Her sincerity and determination see her through even the tougher moments. Watch her climactic scene with her brother and the range of emotions that cross her face as he speaks to her. She nails each one.

I was searching who wrote the review and I am not a bit surprised. once again defending kjo movie praising a star kid. These critics only see hard work and determination for Star kids. Baki to sab ayse he hain.

lol..bootlicking star kid fattus ...anyways not going to work this time.