Haider: To Review .... or Not

"To be, or not to be? That is the question —
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them?"

Kya karein kya na karein...

Vishal Bharadwaj's Haider is forced to battle this question through a forced adaptation of a foreign ethos in a language foisted upon less-than-proficient-in-English Indians since the British "Raj".

Completing his Shakespearean trilogy with Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet, VB seems to have lost much filmmaking edge as he sends his lead actor over the edge of sanity and his film's plot over the edge of plausibility, while himself teetering under the White (now Brown) Man's Burden.

~ It's 1995 in Kashmir -- Kashmir of the Dal Lake, of DD's Gul-Gulshan-Gulfam, of locals with long wintercoats, hot kangris and endearing accents (Baai for Bhai, Garr for Ghar, Zurur for, well, Zarur).
~ It's also 1995 in Kashmir of downtown Srinagar, of Kaul Sahab's abandoned house with coloured window panes, of Indian Army officers, curiously, mostly South Indian and stocky and moustachioed, of armoured white gypsies with red beacons and of Salman Khan doubles who double up as police informers/henchmen.

It's in this 1995 winter of Kashmir's discontent that Haider (Shahid Kapoor) returns home from Aligarh Muslim University and defiantly tells an Army man he lives in Islamabad (a Srinagar locality now renamed). He wanders muck-lined Srinagar streets looking for his disappeared father Dr Hilal Meer (Narendra Jha), while somewhat-sexually obsessed with his primary-school teacher mother Gazala (Tabu) and hoping his traitorous advocate-politician Uncle Khurram (Kay Kay Menon) dies ignominiously.

In between, he also finds time to enlighten his Salman Khan-lookalike police informer friends about the finer points of "chutzpah" versus AFSPA and romances old friend-journalist Arshiya (Shraddha Kapoor) in rooms lit by open fireplaces, with wood smoke and lust hanging heavy.

Not on the "side of life"
From the moment Hilal brings home and shelters an injured militant leader, claiming to be on the "side of life", he exposes his cloistered middle-class existence to the army-police-militant masquerade Kashmir has perfected into a 'martial' art form. Exploiting the chance to eliminate his brother and marry his 'Baabijaan' :-) -- sister-in-law -- Khurram snitches on Hilal, who is packed off to Mama II (a pervert, hilarious renaming of an infamous "interrogation centre"), never to return home. Hilal's journey from the despair of Mama II to the cold embrace of a graveyard makes up much of the film's narrative. It takes Haider to Roohdaar (Irrfan Khan), who further confounds the plot -- in Haider's head -- and adds to the slothful pace of the movie.

Irrfan Khan as Roohdaar

Character assassination
Narendra Jha as Hilal, the militant-sheltering surgeon, gets the tiniest details and the overall sonority right. Tabu tries to make the most of playing stoic Gazala and fails. In her weakest performance till date, Tabu seems to be going through the paces -- apparently resigned to the mindnumbing charade of militant religiosity, unwavering family commitments and the spectacle of men killing each other to assert their rights over women's -- mothers, sisters, wives etc -- bodies!


Kay Kay Menon as the conniving Uncle

Kay Kay Menon plays to perfection the role of Khurram, the lesser man condemned to heap misery and misfortune upon others in pursuit of a semblance of self-worth. He looks the part of the slithery advocate-politician, in some scenes, dripping malice and evil.



Star-crossed

Shraddha Kapoor as Arshiya lights up the screen with her grace and innocence and her faith in a policeman father who kills militants in cold blood and then sits down for a hot meal with his daughter.
Shahid Kapoor, in one of his best performances till date, becomes the character. As the AMU student looking for his disappeared father, the lost lover consumed by Arshiya's death and the wannabe militant who picks up the gun but can't quite press the trigger, Shahid makes for compelling viewing.

Main hoon ki main nahin

Hum hain ki Hum nahin...?
Where Haider loses the plot, literally, is where the plot -- screenplay by writer Basharat Peer and VB -- leaves him stranded and bounces off on a unilinear narrative to condemn any and everything 'Indian'. In this narrative, militants are god-fearing people 'forced' to kill; all 'Indians' are either anti-militancy or anti-'azaadi'; AFSPA is the devil's own accessory, imposed upon a land full of peace-loving albeit gun-toting people; Chutzpah (pronounced Hootspa, not like in the film -- with a certain delight; It means audacity, insolence, cheek) is somehow funny because it sounds like a woman's genitalia but not quite; and where wizened men dig graves in the dead of winter and get trigger-happy while humming a song that means, well, not much.

Mother. India-n?!

By the end of Haider, the conundrum remains,
To be or not to be...
To die, to sleep...
To sleep, perchance to dream...
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

Haider confounds and stupefies, more because of what passes off for fact in the movie than for the sluggish, unfeeling, mechanical narrative. Watch it -- if for nothing else then -- for one filmmaker's misguided re-telling, in insipid monochrome, of the many-hued truth of Kashmir.