Jaya, the heroine of “Panga,” a working mom with a sickly little boy and a smiling husband, cooks, does laundry, shoos her child onto the school bus. She hovers and worries. And is unhappy.
Once upon a time, though, Jaya (Kangana Ranaut) was somebody: the captain of India’s women’s kabaddi team. (The sport, born in India and popular across Asia, is easy enough for the uninitiated to follow onscreen.) But she quit playing when her husband’s job moved the family to Bhopal from Delhi.
Can she make a comeback?
That’s the question in this lightly feminist film, which shifts from being a domestic dramedy to an underdog sports tale, a favorite genre of Indian movies. The link is family: Will Jaya’s husband, Prashant (Jassie Gill), and little boy, Adi (Yagya Bhasin), support her return to kabaddi? Even if she has to move away from them to practice with the team?
Directed by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, “Panga” has an understated realism — about the tempos of family life and the Indian middle class. The drama, too, is understated: bumps in a road paved with good will rather than a clash of values and goals.
Jaya doesn’t have to fight that hard to convince her family that she needs to pursue her sport. Quite the opposite: The idea is her son’s initially. And when she makes the team and decamps to Kolkata, father and son have the occasional gentle crisis — Prashant makes a mess of Adi’s tiger makeup for a school play; his cooking is subpar — but learn to adjust. (One quick fix: Jaya’s mother swoops in to take up cooking duties.)
As a sports story, “Panga” is less heart-pounding than sweet. Jaya has to fight her aging body, her teammates’ idea that she’s too old to play (she’s all of 32) and societal notions about mothers.
As expected, the movie ends with a big tournament, an all-Asia competition, and a climactic match: India versus Iran. But Tiwari is better at probing the emotions under the drama than building a nail-biting, rah-rah finish, though she tries.
Throughout, Tiwari doesn’t get enough help from her script — she wrote it with Nikhil Mehrotra — which knows the beats to hit but not always how to hit them. The film is fuzzy when you want it to be sharp, its characters too generic to register, particularly Gill’s one-note Prashant.
Not so Ranaut’s Jaya, who elevates the movie, putting the story across better than the script can. Ranaut makes Jaya credible and specific; she’s not an every woman or every mom or every athlete. She’s this one, Jaya, and Ranaut makes you care about what kind of place she can find for herself in the world.
Panga
Not rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.