On "Haider"

Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider is an achievement of lyrical, humanistic storytelling. Dense with history, but never pedantic, the film asks why people - creatures of flesh and blood, of love and desire, of songs and laughter - are the first to stop being of significance, to become invisible, to disappear in times of sociopolitical conflict. It is a pointed, sorrowful question, and Haider is a pointed, sorrowful movie.

Bhardwaj's retellings of Shakespeare's tragedies have always felt flavorful and specific, because he always finds a milieu for these centuries-old stories that gives them a jolt of immediacy and topical charge. You may not know the ins and outs, the various versions of the Kashmir story, or be intimately acquainted with this particular moment (the mid-nineties) in its history. But Haider's world will seem at least a little familiar to you, because various iterations of this setting – places of fear and grief and resentment, of soldiers in the streets and of diminished families in homes – are so often in the news that we are probably horrified when we pause to consider how used we've grown to the sights and sounds of people suffering. 

Haider's Kashmir is remarkable not just because of its powerful depiction of that sort of suffering, though. (At one point, a doctor diagnoses Haider with PTSD, but it isn't just him, the film suggests. The entire state is shellshocked. The trauma runs so deep that men have forgotten how to enter their own houses without being frisked.) It is also deeply moving in its evocation of a way of life that we haven't seen often enough on cinema screens. Bhardwaj goes in search for the color and richness in that way of life. He puts a ear to its heart for the music and the poetry in its voices. Fathers and sons sing together. Children learn and play. The dizzying patterns of flowers woven into the carpets and the shawls and painted onto the stoneware shimmer even as life after life goes barren. Haider casually situates its characters amid the flames of Kashmir's gulmohar trees and the elegant inevitability of its snowdrifts, not because these are picturesque, but because these characters belong to this beauty, and this beauty belongs to them. Haider reminds the viewer that the lives that we reduce to numbers (these many dead, these many wounded) are not abstractions. Bhardwaj doesn't dramatize this assertion with cinematic patness or with a heavy, accusing hand. He lets the intimate, warm, lived detail accumulate in each scene until this place feels real and bloody with life - life lived, savored, lost, wasted, truncated. Just as the Faiz Ahmed Faiz verses that close the film, Haider grieves the dead and the living left behind.

The question of grief is of great interest to Bhardwaj here. Haider doesn't know how to even begin grieving. How to process his beloved father's disappearance, his beloved mother's apparent betrayal? He acts out, he comes undone, he haunts the ruins of his childhood home. (Ghosts are a preoccupation in the film. The absence of disappeared family members haunts the lives of their loved ones, holding them in limbo. The specter of old joys and old loves hangs heavy. Men with mutable identities resurface from certain death and disappear into the snow. The Kashmir of Haider is, among other things, a cemetery, and nothing in it is completely dead.) Haider is furious and confused and unhinged and broken, sometimes all at once, and he stumbles painfully in his darkness. Shahid Kapoor, whose melancholy prettiness, sweet voice, and slightly manic way with comedy (and there is a good deal of twisted, Kafka-esque comedy here) suit him to Bhardwaj's cinematic vision, drives that pain home with emphatic grace. His scenes with Tabu (who plays his mother, Ghazala) are devastatingly romantic, the two performers responding to each other's faces and bodies and voices with clarity that feels instinctual. 

While Haider mourns as if that mourning is all that is real to him, Ghazala is aching to be done with mourning. She wants to free herself from the unhappiness of an unsatisfactory marriage, of a missing husband, of a long-absent son. Tabu, as this complex, fascinating character, does the kind of magisterial work that stays with you for a long time. Here is an actor whose unnervingly beautiful face I can watch for hours as it changes shade and register. She brought so much (sex, sadness, intelligence, charisma) to every line, every glance, every silence that I began wishing that the movie were entirely from Ghazala's perspective. Both mother and son are sympathetic. (Very few characters are painted entirely black in Haider; even Kay Kay Menon's unctuous, plotting uncle is lovelorn and wracked with guilt.) The plight of these two allows the film to wonder about the dilemma faced by a wounded people. Ought they to move forward? Can they move forward? Or must they engage again and again with their grief? Haider doesn't come to straightforward conclusions, but it nods toward both remembrance and compassion. The story ends, as everyone knows, in death. But Haider is not merely dirge; it is also serenade.