GF on Haider

this was a response to Qalandar’s piece but it deserves a separate post..

All sorts of spooky spoilers follow…

Your review was a welcome read, Q, as always. I found in Haider a rawness of emotion that I often think is pretty much absent in contemporary Hindi cinema. It was deeply affecting on a purely emotional level, and that on its own is a win. As far as Hindi films of the last several years go, this movie, in its tone, in its nuanced, clear (and novel!) criticism of the establishment and in its daring filmmaking strokes (the visuals, the location shooting, sure, but also the unabashed embrace of all things that are Hindi Film 101) I was actually most reminded of Ratnam’s Raavan. For this reason specifically where I differ with you most is with respect to which “half” of the film I preferred. I found the first hour (and change) of the film, the section dealing with Haider’s search, while watchable, a bit dry, and certainly a bit overlong. I can see the usefulness of this first act, it is novel in its representations, specifically in offering a set of characters unburdened by tired template(s), and, most mercifully, a Kashmir that doesn’t seem like a post-apocalpytic ski resort, but a place where people live and have lived. But this entire section nevertheless felt, to me, like an artless version of Shaji Karun’s (succinct!) masterpiece Piravi, which dealt with a similar kind of hopelessness encountered by a father who also goes in fruitless search of his missing son in the big city, and who, again like Bhardwaj’s Hamlet here, descends into a kind of madness when this search draws him into the interminably circuitous pathways of an aggressively uncaring bureaucracy.

It’s utterly unsurprising to me but Irrfan Khan’s presence elevated the movie immediately, immensely, and from the interval on, I was hooked. The film really had me in its grip from this section to the very end because from the moment Khan arrives, the filmmakers inject a bit of mystery, (a burden that the sublime Tabu had carried almost single-handedly for that first hour) and just the faintest dollop of masala, into what had been, up to that point, a realistic political drama like many other realistic political dramas about ordinary people getting ground to the dust by an abominable, intractable situation. I don’t mean to be too critical or indelicate about the latter kind of movie. Just that when these ideas are braided to a narrative that then becomes more accessible, more energetic, (for lack of a better term) they become all the more admirable for their ambition, to make no mention of their value as pure entertainment.

The ending complicated things. Its cue seems to have come from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, where the filmmaker took very well known source material and changed the final beat so that things would serve his specific worldview. So while Kashyap transformed Devdas from a loathsome, self-destructive Have to a human, world-weary Have-Not, (and kept him alive for it) Bhardwaj takes Hamlet from reluctant soldier to reluctant pacifist (and keeps him from taking revenge for it). The ambition is interesting…and also a near-complete betrayal of Shakespeare’s play. It is finally quite moving, not least because one senses that this choice reveals that Bhardwaj is more concerned about Kashmir than he is about Shakespeare. The problem of course is that Shakespeare traffics in truth, while Bhardwaj is more interested in fantasy, or less pejoratively, in idealism. In choosing to dramatize the latter, he pulled a punch, and a crucial one at that.

Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy as a whole deserves better, more thoughtful criticism at some point. It occurs to me that he began at the cinematic center of India and gradually pulled out to its farthest geopolitical frontier. That the last film in the sequence is one that seems to constantly negotiate its political context with its cinematic soul seems fitting.

There’s a lot more rattling around in my head but I’ll pause here. If only to just add this – boycotting this film might be the right call for some, (to me it’s simply a choice to not see a good movie) but I’d love it if someone started a simultaneous boycott of Bang Bang. Because at least then we wouldn’t be punishing gifted artists.