'Bharat' trailer: No, Priyanka Chopra shouldn't have left this Salman Khan movie
That Priyanka Chopra is concentrating on her Hollywood career and YouTube channel is an altogether different issue — but Bharat could have been a mind-blowing comeback for her to Bollywood. At least that’s the impression we gathered from its trailer released today.
The movie, directed by Ali Abbas Zafar and produced by Salman Khan Films, will hit the theatres on June 5.
The trailer opens with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech “At the stroke of the midnight hour” with a blinking screen portraying the time period the movie captures. Then, there are these things: Salman Khan aka Bharat in various avatars, Delhi, bike racing, Salman jump-sitting on his bike after touching two cars, dance shots, India, Nehru’s death, unemployment — and a lot of other things.
Then there comes Katrina Kaif — a pleasant surprise as she is not presented as eye-candy in the movie. This is the role that Priyanka Chopra was supposed to do, but she left.
Piecing together various jump-cut shots in the trailer, what we get is Salman Khan’s father, essayed by Jackie Shroff, named him 'Bharat' after the country India, and thus, Bharat never used any surname — so that the spirit of India doesn’t get weighed down.
But of course, such garrulous explanations do not help when one is looking for a job and not in front of a strict ‘madam sir’, essayed by Katrina.
Yes, later she starts dancing — but at least we are happy that she was not dancing from the very beginning.
India and its politics serve as the setting of Bharat’s story, which is actually the story of a man and the nation.
So, it’s written all over the film that it is all about Salman Khan. But the trailer reveals that many a thread merges in Bharat’s lives — as from a car racer, we see him working in an oil company and then probably joining the Navy.
Bharat, surely and thankfully, is not Race.
Salman Khan and Ali Abbas Zafar's previous collaborations gave us Sultan and Tiger Zinda Hai.
Bharat is on those lines and may indeed excel in its heady cocktail of nationalism, history, politics — and love.