India’s stunning 1983 World Cup triumph is retold in endearing style by a sports film with a sharp anticolonialist drive
Previously a fashioner of star vehicles for Salman Khan, director Kabir Khan anchors this nimble and big-hearted biopic of the India cricket team’s improbable 1983 World Cup triumph in a smiling performance from new-generation hunk Ranveer Singh as captain Kapil Dev. Dev’s wobbly English, which makes him a laughing stock among his teammates, seems to stand for the group’s inferiority complex. But inside this awkwardness is an obduracy and capacity for improvisation that becomes the guiding light of their victory run. As he blurts out on the team bus: “Taste the success once, tongue want more!”
India, who had only won a single World Cup match before the tournament, were deeply unfancied outsiders. So Khan frames the arrival in England of Dev, and other now legendary cricketers such as Sunil Gavaskar (played by Tahir Raj Bhasin) and Roger Binny (Nishant Dahiya), in jauntily comic underdog vein. They exceed import regulations by bringing in pickles to spice up British grub and ogle sex workers’ calling cards; they’re beaten in the warm-ups by a county side and condescended to by officials, journalists and commentators. What separates 83 from the likes of The Full Monty, though, is a realpolitik edge; in finding their groove and turning over a terrifying West Indies side whose fast-bowling style the film suggests was their riposte to their one-time British masters, the Indians were also mustering an anti-colonial poke in the eye.
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