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Haider Movie Reviews - 5/5


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Shakespeare lives! Seldom if ever, has a Shakespearean tragedy been given such a magnificent treatment in cinema of any language. Sure, the narrative is fractured and fatally flawed at times, but like the hero's villainous uncle, who lies limbless writhing in pain in the Kashmiri snow pleading for death at the end, the narrative dares you to end the pain of a people who wear their brutal existence on their sleeves.

Haider is a beast that just won't be tamed by regular cinematic definitions. There is flamboyance and subtlety, both at once in the treatment. Elegance and earthiness rub shoulders in the execution of what is regarded as one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies.

And to place Hamlet in militant Kashmir, what a masterstroke! Haider is the kind of rarest of rare cinema that unfurls wave after wave of exquisite narrative fuel into the frames, providing a kind of compelling narration that is propelled as much by the passionate writing as the intuitive direction.

Mr Bhardwaj understands his Shakespeare inside out. He transmutes "Hamlet" into Haider with an unbridled fearlessness, tempered by a restraint of treatment that goes a long way in imparting an urgent sense of beauty to the work.

The basic idea is compelling to the core. Freeing his narrative from the fretful freedom of excessive self-indulgence seen in his last film Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, Mr Bhardwaj's vision takes wings creating one of the most complex and compelling mother-son relationships seen before and after Yash Chopra's Deewaar.

That Tabu and Shahid play the mother and son torn by the agonising disappearance of the man they both love (Narendra Jha, a surprisingly well cast actor in a role that is more about absence than presence) is a blessing for Mr Bhardwaj's Shakespeare. I don't think any other two actors could have better understood the political, cultural and emotional complexities of their characters.

Tabu and Shahid get a firm grip on their characters and pitch their emotional compulsions into Kashmir's tormenting tale of terrorism during times of oedipal impulses. Their performing range hits the highest octaves without getting shrill. Tabu is the Lata Mangeshkar of the performing arts.

The narrative - so supple and strong it defers any dispute regarding its raison d'être - opens on a fateful chilling night in Srinagar when a doctor accused of harbouring terrorists disappears. His wife shares a discernibly sexual relationship with her brother-in-law (Kay Kay Menon). And the son, who was forced to leave Kashmir by his militancy-paranoid mother, returns as an educated young man to see his mother's illicit relationship with his uncle (Kay Kay Menon).
 

 

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At times Mr Bhardwaj's vision turns playfully towards Shakespeare's plays. There is the comic relief in the form of two Salman Khan lookalikes running a video parlour in Mr Bhardwaj's Kashmir in 1995. Salman's films run playfully through the film like a prankish leitmotif, doing nothing to the main character’s pain-lashed lives. Towards the end three grave-diggers straight out of Shakespeare, sing and dance in and around the graves.

Cinematographer Pankaj Kumar, who earlier shot the amazing Ship Of Theseus, penetrates and probes the brutal tragedy of Kashmir. Once there, the visuals insinuate a profound affinity between nature and man's cruelty. Who knows what goes on in the minds of politicians, poets and other nation builders?

Haider looks at a grieving son's search for his missing father with languorous affection. There are bouts of tenderness and brutality in the narrative which sometimes overlap without warning.

Above all, there are the performances - towering, luminous actors craning their collective creative necks into the director's vision, to give it mesmerising magical spin. While the supporting cast including Jha, Lalit Parimoo (remember him in Doordarshan's Kashmiri serial Gul Gulshan Gulfam?), Aamir Bashir and a host of actors illuminate the edges of this darkly ignited revenge saga, it is the three principal actors who pin Bhardwaj's Shakespearean drama down to a level of cinematic lyricism.

Kay Kay as Haider's treacherous uncle is so wickedly subtle evil yet humane that you wonder where this brilliant actor got waylaid in his journey in cinema.

As for Shahid's torn troubled tormented Haider, the actor brings out all the inner conflicts in a shimmering rush of Shakespearean angst. With this one performance, Shahid proves himself notches above all his contemporaries.

But it's Tabu whose haunted face as the bereaved wife and the troubled mother that will stay with me for many years to come. To the role of the mysterious dramatic deceptive woman, Tabu brings a kind of inner illumination that lights up the darkest corners of her character's soul. Her scenes with her screen-son Shahid are smothered in unspoken words and recrimination.

Bhardwaj shoots one lengthy dialogue between the two in one single shot...and why not when you have two actors who seem to have visited the soul of the Shakespearean play and transported it to the pain of Kashmir?

As Haider's love interest Shraddha Kapoor struggles to create space for herself in the mother-son saga. She has her brilliant moments towards the end where we see her humming a Kashmiri folk tune in numbed grief oblivious to the world that gave her that grief.

Irrfan, who has a capricious cameo, also gets the film's only funny line.

But this is not a film about laughter and humour. Haider looks at the grim reality of the Valley through a Shakespearean prism. Shahid's Haider is one of Hindi cinema's most tragic heroes ever. He bleeds into the narrative's heart without allowing a drop of blood to stain the surface.

Mr Bhardwaj's third Shakespearean sojourn is his best yet. Haider is like a painting viewed from the road inside an art gallery. The vision is distant yet vivid, layered life-like and yet exquisitely poetic. By the time Rekha Bhardwaj comes on to sing an evocative song at the end about all the loss of the Kashmiris, I couldn't move from my seat.

And yes, Mr Bhardwaj's background score rises and falls in swelling tides of blood soaked undulations. Besides Hamlet/Haider, the other truly tragic hero in this cinematic marvel is Kashmir.

Set in a fatally flawed paradise Haider screams silently to be recognised as a wondrous work of art.

To see or not to see? That isn't a question at all. Rush to the movies and forget all the slam-bang-bang stuff that is beckoning in glamorous postures. The glamour of Haider lies in fold after fold of poetic statement on love, life and politics. You simply can't help being seduced into attentive submission

 

Rating: 5/5

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Haider may be Vishal Bhardwaj's best film - 5/5

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Vishal Bharadwaj's Haider is one of the most powerful political films we've ever made, a bonafide masterpiece that throbs with intensity and purpose, says Raja Sen.

Something is rotten in the state two countries call their own.

Not that we've really let that show on screen.

Hindi cinema hasn't looked into Kashmir, preferring to gaze at it instead.

Haider changes all that, with filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj probing into the valley nimbly and incisively -- we may, at this point, picture the director as a particularly poetic insurgent, wearing Shakespeare for a cloak.

This is not a simple adaptation, this takes not a simplistic stance; Haider is a remarkable achievement and one of the most powerful political films we've ever made, a bonafide masterpiece that throbs with intensity and purpose.

It is a staggeringly clever take on Hamlet, one whose departures from the Bard's original are as thrilling as its closely-hewn loyalty.

The film is set in 1995, with Kashmir in the murkiest of limbos, at a time when it's anybody's guess whether any man wearing a long, all-shrouding phiran is hiding either a pot of hot coals or a hand-grenade. Haider -- in case you haven't guessed -- is the kind of film that carries both.

The Hamlet here is Haider, a poetry student returning to Kashmir, summoned by the destruction of the family house and the disappearance of his father.

He finds his 'half-widowed' mother, Ghazala, laughing dazzlingly by the sunlight and his uncle, Khurram, dancing.

He is disgusted, depressed, and desperate for an answer, for a way forward.

And, on one not-so farfetched afternoon given the state he's in, a mysterious man appears to replace his loathing with fury -- to arm a clueless, restless young man with murderous intent.

The allegories are elegantly drawn and exquisitely sharp, like bejewelled daggers.

The film is written by Bhardwaj and acclaimed journalist (and former Rediff writer) Basharrat Peer, and it is bold for many reasons.

The two stunning Shakespeare adaptations Bhardwaj made before this stayed close to the structure of the originals: Maqbool whimsically played fast-and-loose with characterisations but managed to wrap a crime-boss film neatly around the Scottish play; Omkara stayed so ingenuously loyal to Othello that it even translated lines of dialogue and had pacing similar to the play, but left out the monologues.

Haider, while leaving in the crucial monologues, makes audacious changes to the film -- for example, the play's plot only kicks in when the ghost (or the man with the ghost IDs, more accurately) appears, around the midway mark -- and several key moments deviate dramatically from the original.

These are not subtle changes but these shifts are what make Haider a truly ambitious film.

It bludgeons away from the original because, just like the world it is set in, harsh changes are called for.

A young man finds himself fatherless -- de-fathered by the machinery of the state, in fact -- and tormented by local demons, terrorists and politicians.

In Kashmir, this saga of disappearance and drama, of uncertainty and unrest, cannot be the tale of one prince or one exalted family; in Kashmir, where mothers know the name 'Kalashnikov' all too well, there are too many Hamlets.

The detailing is a marvel.

Characters speak with, as Robert Plant would say "tongues of lilting grace," in that delightful, characteristically Kashmiri way of hardboiled consonants and fluid vowels.

A doctor's coat is chequered, just like the local phirans and jackets, chairs and beds are ornately whittled into works of art we can sit on, and the bedsheets are beautiful, chain-stitched wonders.

The authenticity is constant, and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar captures detail without lingering gratuitously on it, preferring instead to shoot from the characters' un-touristy eyes or -- better still -- to eavesdrop close to them, hovering too-close with brilliant, hand-held unpredictability.

We see the distractingly attractive world around them, sure, but the narrative stays grim and, thus hand-in-hand, Kumar's composition centres on things so close you can touch -- the smoke rising from a cup of kahwa in the cold, an accusingly large dot of mehndi on the back of a hand, letters handed out by the postman in plastic packets as if he were delivering cold cuts.

This is a film you could watch with the sound muted.

But you shouldn't.

Oh no.

The music is gorgeous, underscoring the narrative perfectly. (The gravedigger song is my favourite.) Yet while we're used to Bhardwaj the director making way for Bhardwaj the composer (and, when we’re luckiest, Bhardwaj the singer), the Haider soundtrack knows its place and is allowed no room to showboat.

The grim narrative carries strong political heft, and so assured is Bhardwaj of what he's saying and the way it needs to be said that he doesn't seem to feel the temptation to sugarcoat, to entertain with either song or wink.

The film stays intense throughout, almost breathlessly so. Like a chokehold from someone you love.

The performances are uniformly stunning.

Shahid Kapoor, dealing with one of Shakespeare’s most challenging heroes, does so with impressive sincerity. He manages the many shifts of mood skilfully but always appears like an actor performing a role gamely instead of an actor who has become the character: he's very good, just not as unaffected as the actors around him.

An actor called Narendra Jha who plays a doctor is an absolute find, Lalit Parimoo is excellent, Shraddha Kapoor is very believable in the Ophelia part, two Salman Khan fans (Sumit Kaul and Rajat Bhagat) are a lot of fun, and it's good to see Kulbhushan Kharbanda get well-forged lines of dialogue.

At the heart of the film stands Tabu.

Her Ghazala is a heartbreaking character, all passion and preening and perpetually inappropriate relationships.

She looks luminous the first time we see her, but the great actress can amazingly adjust that candle-wick lighting up her face, so not just does she shine and simmer, but she can flicker.

The way she looks into the mirror while her son kisses her… It's haunting.

Old Bhardwaj alumnus and former Macbeth Irrfan Khan, meanwhile, is striking in a very clever role that both shows off his screen-presence and kicks the film into a different gear.

The best performance comes from Kay Kay Menon in the Claudius role.

His Khurram is a slimeball aching to be accepted as a success, an unctuous man and yet one who likes to strut, who likes to revel in his victories -- but who, at the singular point of triumph -- can only find a fellow conspirator to embrace.

This is a traditionally meaty part, immortalised by Derek Jacobi in the 1996 Hamlet, but Kay Kay gives the character his own terrific edge, twitchy and tentative and surprisingly warm.

One particularly unforgettable moment in the film features Peer himself in a cameo as a man afraid to cross the threshold into his own house.

That particular scene, and its subsequent, immediate resolution, comes from a short-story by Kashmiri writer Akhtar Mohiuddin. It is a great story of such frightening clarity that most filmmakers would have milked it into a longer scene, if not a short-film.

Bhardwaj, now more than ever, seems assured of the power of his content, and knows when to pull his punches and doesn't fall for obvious temptations.

The result is a knockout, a film that makes you smell corpses, that makes you shudder with melancholia, and a film that points accusing fingers. A film that doesn't flinch.

 

 

 

 

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antha gopa emi vundi cinema... shakespear antunadu manam chudagalam...

enduku vachindi le bhayya neeku rodda kottudu Aagadu leda GAV  choodu .

 

 

 

close to reality cinemaly neeku goppa ga undavu le bhayya.

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