character wheel about Kabir Khan in chak de India
Answers
In ‘Chak De! India’, director Shimit Amin convincingly narrates the triumph of the Indian Women’s Hockey team that begins the film as underdogs. Even today, people talk about the performance of Shah Rukh Khan, who gave us goosebumps by bringing alive on screen some killer lines from the script. People may also not fail to remember the various characters that formed a part of the hockey team, such as Balbir Kaur, Komal Chautala, and Bindya Naik.
Why are these women characters remembered even today? The writer, Jaideep Sahni, consistently shows these characters with their unique traits throughout the film. These characters also undergo an internal journey, similar to the external journey of their team.
I wanted to talk about the character establishment of the women athletes in the scene where the players register for the national team. The writer-director duo takes six minutes of screentime to show us their unique personalities and traits. Their uniqueness gets repeated in the film to maintain consistency. The viewer, having already figured them out in the character establishment scene, gets a head start on these characters' psyche, instead of asking the question that plagues a lot of films: 'But why is the person behaving this way?'.
Setting up characters goes a long way in investing in their journeys. For example, if I saw Balbir Kaur for the first time in the film getting angry at another player during the game, here are a couple of questions that I, as a viewer, may want to ask the writer: Why does this person behave the way that she does? Does this person behave the same off the field as well? Since this is a sports film, the same set of questions would apply to the rest of the players as well. And since there are eleven players involved in a game of Hockey, a viewer might fail to remember each one of these characters because of their individualities.