Sitaare Zameen Par: If you need Aamir Khan to manipulate you into being a good person, maybe you’re beyond redemption

While watching any film, it is important to understand who the target audience is, especially Hindi movies, which are often slotted into rigid categories. It’s theoretically possible for a 65-year-old ‘tirth yatri’ from Rithala to enjoy the fourth Twilight movie on a bus to Amarnath, but, you’d agree that they probably wouldn’t care much for shiny vampires and their politics. The Twilight movies are aimed at teenage girls, just as Aamir Khan’s Sitaare Zameen Par is targeted at the sort of folks for whom kindness doesn’t come naturally. Khan plays their surrogate in the film, directed by RS Prasanna and based on the Spanish-language hit Campeones. It’s the star’s second remake in a row, after the poorly received Laal Singh Chaddha from a couple of years ago.

Like that film, whose critical and commercial failure nearly pushed the actor into retirement — it really wasn’t all that bad — Sitaare Zameen Par sermonises about inclusivity and empathy. But here’s the difference; while Laal Singh Chaddha approached the subject of neurodivergence via a neurodivergent character, Sitaare Zameen Par asks its audience to get behind a particularly nasty neurotypical man before preaching to them about things that, truth be told, they should already know. Sure, many might not, but it’s probably going to take more than an Aamir Khan to convert them. It might educate, but it won’t transform. It’s like the film Chhori, which ended with a (literal) message for baby-killers, insisting that killing babies is, in fact, not the right thing to do.

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A still from Sitaare Zameen Par.

In Sitaare Zameen Par, Khan plays a basketball coach named Gulshan, who gets fired from his job after assaulting his boss to satisfy his own entitlement. He then gets drunk and rams his car into a parked police vehicle. He’s also estranged from his wife, and entirely unbothered about reconciling with her or even listening to her point of view about something they’ve been arguing about. When he’s sentenced to three months of community service, during which he must coach neurodivergent kids in basketball, he repeatedly refers to them as ‘paagal’. This is the man whose journey Sitaare Zameen Par takes us on; you already know how it’s going to end, and if you’re even moderately decent as a human being, you know that hanging out with someone like this isn’t going to be pleasant.

Whether or not Gulshan comes out the other end a better person is irrelevant — spoiler alert, he does — but the movie bizarrely expects you to understand where he’s coming from in the early scenes, when he’s being an absolute terror to the poor kids. And because we don’t exactly see him display even the slightest hint of decency in the film’s opening act, it becomes impossible to root for him. He deserves every bit of the ‘punishment’ he receives; he deserves to be fired for assaulting his boss; he deserves to be dumped by a wife he doesn’t care for; he deserves to be penalised for drunk driving. It’s not like Gulshan is an innocent man that we can easily get behind; it’s not that he’s a caring person who merely lost his way. No, he was always a cruel, selfish boor.

So, what do you do for over two hours after you’ve realised that the movie isn’t speaking to you? Now that Sitaare Zameen Par is available to watch at home, you can choose to switch it off and watch Nagraj Manjule’s Jhund instead. Or, you can continue watching Gulshan take baby steps towards giving everyone around him basic dignity. To the film’s credit, this happens organically, and Gulshan’s evolution isn’t as episodic as it could’ve been. That said, the decision to present Sitaare Zameen Par as a broad comedy — we’re talking sound effects, pratfalls, slapstick humour — is rather baffling. But the first two acts of Laal Singh Chaddha had the same issue.

This is presumably because Khan doesn’t take direction. Or worse, he pretends to take direction. It’s like the opposite of his contemporary Salman Khan, who, by several accounts, walks onto set and lazily performs one take and one take only, holding the entire movie to hostage based on his mood on that day. Aamir, on the other hand, seems to perform every scene as if he’s just had a spoonful of Ranveer Singh’s schezwan chutney. The movie has no choice but to match his energy. Sitaare Zameen Par has a distinctly patronising tone that might remind you of 12th Fail. In its efforts to make ‘sabka apna apna normal hota hai’ some sort of slogan, the movie doesn’t realise that it’s othering the neurodivergent community in virtually every scene.

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A still from Sitaare Zameen Par.

Even in its final moments, Gulshan makes a speech about how much he has learnt from ‘them’. Every scene, every plot development, every twist and turn is designed to highlight just how different ‘they’ are to him, whereas the goal should’ve been to highlight the similarities. In the last few years alone, films such as Shane Black’s The Predator, M Night Shyamalan’s Split, and Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry have come under fire from progressive circles for suggesting that being on the spectrum is some kind of superpower. In Sitaare Zameen Par, the filmmakers go so far as to give every member of the team defining traits. There’s a reason why the term ‘specially abled’ is considered patronising now; it erases the very real adversities that a person might have faced.

Sitaare Zameen Par hinges on the bizarre presumption that every audience member shares Gulshan’s worldview. This is ignorant at best, and insulting at worst. The movie might pretend to be a social drama, but, towards the end, it reveals itself to be an examination of one man’s insecurities and regrets. When Gulshan weaponises his short stature in the climactic match, it becomes obvious that this story has always been more about him (and the person playing him) than it is about the team. There is a graceful way to weave these two threads together, as the documentary Next Goal Wins showed in the past, but Sitaare Zameen Par is the kind of movie that spells its agendas out via (blunt) dialogue to make sure that everybody ‘gets it’. Like every redemption story, it’s born out of guilt; guilt for being self-centred, insensitive, and envious. The sooner the movie admits this, the less exploitative it will seem.

Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.

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