In the run-up to the release of Mary Kom, the biopic that hits theatres this weekend, the press was filled with PR blurbs about how much work actress Priyanka Chopra had done to ensure that she represented the Manipuri boxer as authentically as possible. The actress visited the boxer in her village of Kangathei, met her family, watched local dances and went to her church.
That research seems to have disappeared into a black hole. Though the film is entertaining, it fails to capture the essence of the great boxer's cultural and geographical context.
To being with, the film has got the landscape and the language of Mary Kom's village quite wrong. Instead of the expansive rice fields in Manipur, the film depicts fully grown fields of wheat ‒ a crop that isn't grown in the state. Most of the outdoor sequences in the village are shot in locations that are picturesque and lofty, giving the impression of a hill-station. Mary Kom’s village in Manipur is actually in the foothills.
Even the slightly shoddy, gloomy yet alluring church where Mary Kom gets married is quite out of place. It looked like a church in Darjeeling or Nainital rather than the low-ceilinged and the often brightly painted shrines of Manipur.
For Manipuris watching the film, the language is a bit of a joke. Characters whose first language is not Hindi speak Hindi with a few words of Meiteilon thrown in, including a smattering of Meiteilon slang. This is a little absurd, because Mary Kom and her family actually speak the Kom dialect. Even more ridiculous is the device of having characters repeat words in both languages. They say things like “ngaikho” and then follow up with the same word in Hindi, “ruko”.
That’s absurd and illogical. Since this is a Bollywood film, the characters should only have spoken Hindi. If this was an attempt at a multilingual film, it fails completely.
If you ignore these blunders, you might still laugh and cry as Priyanka in the role of Mary Kom sets out to conquer the world. But as a representation of Mary Kom's world, this biopic is incomplete and misleading.
That research seems to have disappeared into a black hole. Though the film is entertaining, it fails to capture the essence of the great boxer's cultural and geographical context.
To being with, the film has got the landscape and the language of Mary Kom's village quite wrong. Instead of the expansive rice fields in Manipur, the film depicts fully grown fields of wheat ‒ a crop that isn't grown in the state. Most of the outdoor sequences in the village are shot in locations that are picturesque and lofty, giving the impression of a hill-station. Mary Kom’s village in Manipur is actually in the foothills.
Even the slightly shoddy, gloomy yet alluring church where Mary Kom gets married is quite out of place. It looked like a church in Darjeeling or Nainital rather than the low-ceilinged and the often brightly painted shrines of Manipur.
For Manipuris watching the film, the language is a bit of a joke. Characters whose first language is not Hindi speak Hindi with a few words of Meiteilon thrown in, including a smattering of Meiteilon slang. This is a little absurd, because Mary Kom and her family actually speak the Kom dialect. Even more ridiculous is the device of having characters repeat words in both languages. They say things like “ngaikho” and then follow up with the same word in Hindi, “ruko”.
That’s absurd and illogical. Since this is a Bollywood film, the characters should only have spoken Hindi. If this was an attempt at a multilingual film, it fails completely.
If you ignore these blunders, you might still laugh and cry as Priyanka in the role of Mary Kom sets out to conquer the world. But as a representation of Mary Kom's world, this biopic is incomplete and misleading.
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