Release date:
|
October 2, 2014
|
Director:
|
Vishal Bhardwaj
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Shahid Kapoor,
Tabu, Kay Kay Menon, Narendra Jha, Shraddha Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Lalit
Parimoo, Aamir Bashir, Ashish Vidyarthi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda
Hindi
|
“Inteqaam se sirf inteqaam paida hota hai. Jab tak hum apne inteqaam se
azaad nahin honge, koi azaadi humey azaad nahin kar sakti.”
These words from writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Haider are as relevant to William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The thing about
strong adaptations is that while they are at one level inseparable from the
original, they also determinedly stand on their own. Something was rotten in
the state of Denmark in which The Bard set his play. Four centuries later, Vishal
finds that rot in the festering wounds of militancy-and-Army-ridden Kashmir where
a young man returns home from Aligarh to find his father missing and his beautiful
mother apparently being courted by his uncle.
From the template
provided by Shakespeare’s play, Vishal and co-writer Basharat Peer have carved
out Haider (played by Shahid Kapoor), his father Dr Hilaal Meer (Narendra Jha),
Haider’s mother Ghazala (Tabu), Dr Meer’s brother Khurram (Kay Kay Menon), Haider’s
girlfriend Arshia Lone (Shraddha Kapoor) and a whole range of other characters
completely rooted in the snow and soil and political turmoil of Kashmir.
Haider is not about state politics though. It is about
individuals using political scenarios to further petty personal goals, while appearing
to support a larger cause.
And with that, Vishal
Bhardwaj is back in form, people! There’s been a steady decline in the quality of
his work, from Kaminey (2009), a nice
film that somewhere along the way overwhelmed its soul with its stylised
storytelling; to the mixed bag that was Saat Khoon Maaf (2011), where once again it seemed in places that he was trying
to be someone he was not; and last year’s disappointing Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola. Haider
is not utterly, unquestionably brilliant like the other two films in his
Shakespeare trilogy, Maqbool and Omkara, but it is certainly a worthy
companion to them.
The beauty of that quote (marginally edited) posted at the start of this review is that when Ghazala utters those words to her son she is referring to his self-destructive quest for revenge in his personal life, but the reference could well have been to the
bitterness of Kashmiri Muslims towards the Indian state. As layered as Vishal
and Basharat’s screenplay is Tabu’s performance as Ghazala. She is brooding in
places, playful elsewhere, and it’s impossible to tell until the final scene whether
she was truly duplicitous or a victim of a mentally disturbed Haider’s imagination;
whether she was indeed a willing participant in the intrigues against her
husband or a pawn in a wily relative’s game or a little bit of both.
The film is less
judgemental towards Ghazala/Gertrude and Arshia/Ophelia than the play was, and Haider/Hamlet’s
animosity towards Khurram/Claudius is shown to be not entirely innocent. Many
literary critics have read an Oedipal desire into Hamlet’s relationship with
Gertrude. Here it is more pronounced, driven home through Haider’s physical
interactions with Ghazala and some clever casting. Tabu is merely 10 years
older than Shahid. This does not, however, come across as just another instance
of the sexism that prompts Bollywood to routinely give women roles they are too
young for and men roles they are too old for. Tabu as Ghazala looks less like Haider’s
mother and more like a hot older girlfriend. Theirs is an intriguing, disquieting
bond.
Through this awkward
personal relationship playing out in the foreground, Vishal delivers a politically
brave film in which AFSPA is derided in verse and stone throwers are metaphorically
referenced with deathly rocks. Haider is
also that rare Hindi film (like YRF’s Fanaa)
which risks bringing up the promised plebiscite that never took place.
It needs to be said
though that notwithstanding a passing mention of how Kashmiri Pandits were
driven out of their homes, Haider is
told entirely through the Muslim gaze. Well, that too is a point of view we
need to hear, especially since the film does not seek to appease the community.
It not only portrays Army torture of Muslims civilians and the desolation of
the real life Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons; it also shows the
repeated betrayal of Muslims by fellow Muslims. What’s missing –
disappointingly – is an equal sensitivity towards the betrayal of Pandits,
which we got in Aamir Bashir’s achingly desolate Harud (2012) even though that was a film about the misery of
Muslims in the state today; and Onir’s brilliant I Am (2011), which was about the strained bond between a Pandit
girl and her Muslim childhood friend.
In this context one of
the text plates at the end of the film is clumsy in its effort to pander to right-wing
nationalists outside the state. Why else was it deemed necessary to salute the
Army’s role in the recent Kashmir floods in black-and-white, when it had no
relevance to this particular story? If Vishal and his co-producers panicked or
were bullied into posting that salaam, they should have been less gauche about
it.
Just as poorly conceived
is the plot point that finally explains the treachery towards Dr Hilaal. Without
revealing anything, I ask this: Could someone be so stupid as to not even worry
about a possible phone tap in a state where suspicion hangs thick in the air? Haider
and Arshia’s lovemaking is also exasperating – old-fashioned Hindi filmi
copulation hesitating to be as modern as it wants to be. C’mon, when you intend
to plant lips on lips, why dawdle before getting to that point? The scene and
the accompanying song pointlessly slow down Haider.
It’s interesting that the
voices raised against the non-Manipuri Priyanka Chopra being cast as Mary Kom have
been silent on the casting of a bunch of non-Kashmiris – not counting Lalit
Parimoo and Aamir Bashir – to play Kashmiris in a film set in Kashmir. Seriously,
that shouldn’t be an overriding problem in any film unless the filmmaker is
intentionally racist or the cast ends up caricaturing accents and using excessive
makeup or prosthetics to look different from what they are in reality. No one
does that in Haider. In such a
scenario, if actors want to give the local accent a shot, they should either go
all the way (without making a mockery of it) or not try it at all. The hazards
of half measures are evident in Kay Kay’s elongated “ghaaar” which pops up like a sore thumb, and Shraddha who is
compelled by the screenplay to emphasise her Kashmiri English in one scene,
which does not blend with the way she speaks in the rest of the film.
Barring these
reservations, there is much that is poignant, profound and poetic in Haider. The transposing of a European
Christian story to an Indian Muslim (rather than Hindu) community facilitates
the use of some legendary motifs from the original play such as the gravediggers’
scene. In fact the shovelling of the snow here yields one of the most memorable
uses we’ve seen in a Hindi film of a throbbing, crunching natural sound flowing
into music.
That goosebump-inducing
scene is preceded by others and gives way to many more. There are moments
during the stunningly sung, photographed and choreographed song Bismil, as Haider leaps in the air, stomps
about making staccato moves uncharacteristic of Bollywood, thrusts and parries with
Gulzar’s words set to Vishal’s eerily pulsating melody in Sukhwinder’s booming voice,
when it’s hard to tell whether you are listening to your own raised heartbeat
or the song.
Shahid is one of the
Hindi film industry’s best dancers, but in Bismil
– Vishal’s interpretation of the play-within-a-play scene in Hamlet – he has outdone himself by
stepping out of his skin and into the spirit of his character. Except for
fleeting moments when the actor Shahid Kapoor becomes visible on screen, this
is what he achieves with his rendition of Haider as a whole. In fact, with the
exception of the accent trip-ups, most of the actors in the film hit the bull’s
eye, with the towering Tabu being matched scene for scene by Kay Kay. The
wonderful Narendra Jha stays etched in the memory despite his limited screen
time. In terms of both writing and acting, the disappointment of the lot is the
usually impeccable Irrfan. His Roohdhaar is given a grand entrance befitting a
mainstream masala star, but then remains curiously impactless.
Partnering Vishal in this
celluloid elegy is DoP Pankaj Kumar. It takes a special kind of talent to visit
a place famed for its magnificence and sock us between the eyes as he does with
its visuals, as if we’re seeing it for the first time. His canvas extends from
the splendid scenery to Tabu’s splendid face and gruesome, bloody scenes in
which the camera refuses to be exploitative.
As any adaptation of Hamlet would be, Haider is grim. It bears repeating that this is not a film about Kashmir; it’s about the man Haider/Hamlet
and the opportunities provided to the characters in his story when the setting
happens to be Kashmir. With its constant theatricality and melodrama, Haider is a continuous bow to the medium
Hamlet was written for. The result is
a stirring, unsettling tale that needs not just to be watched, but to be
experienced.
Rating
(out of five stars): ****
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U/A
|
Running time:
|
162 minutes
|
.jpg)
.jpg)