Soorarai Pottru (2020)

(Amazon Streaming, September 2021) Capitalists of the world will be reassured to find out that the pseudo-populist business tycoon biopic is alive and well, as evidenced by India’s Soorarai Pottru. Here we follow a young entrepreneur, a former fighter jet pilot, who gets the idea of a low-cost airline fit to compete with train travel for poorer Indians. Viewers familiar with such hagiographies will recognize the ways in which it’s dramatized for maximum impact — the personalization of opposition into one central figure, the truth-stretched dramatic events on which everything hinges, and the hard-headedness of the protagonist presented as a virtue. It’s all overdone to a point that skirts ridiculousness, something that’s not helped by some specific aspects of Indian cinema. The national style of blending musical numbers doesn’t quite match up with the hard-nosed business fable, the subpar CGI regularly breaks immersion, and the tagging of specific shots with text indicating that they do not reflect the procedures or opinions of Indian state organization clearly highlights the lack of independence between Indian filmmaking and Indian government. (Yes, I suspect that the text was the result of a contractual obligation in obtaining privileged access to state facilities for shooting — but there’s nothing quite so illustrative of social differences between here and there than finding out just how some facets of Indian society are excessively deferent to others.) Then there’s the truth-versus-fiction factor: It doesn’t take a lot of research about Deccan Air to find out just how fanciful writer-director Sudha Kongara became in adapting the story — in real life, our protagonist already owned a cargo airline before starting a low-cost passenger line, and that company merged with another one five years later. Despite those issues, some significant pacing problems throughout the film, and many unquestioned assumptions about capitalism and nepotism (hurray for giving catering contracts within the family!), Soorarai Pottru is generally entertaining to watch. It doesn’t pass muster in North America for the litany of reasons described above, but it can be a revelatory glimpse at a very different culture.