Haider, a film worth watching

When we talk about a land, we first talk about its culture and people, but surprisingly these two attributes drop off our list when the land is a disturbed one.  Politics takes the center stage and completely subsumes the land’s narrative, such that even if you want to tell personal stories, you have to place them within a political framework.

As time goes the political narrative becomes complex with various strands braiding themselves into a thick and intricate narrative.   Vishal Bhardwaj has had to deal with a similar situation for  Haider, his latest movie,  where he has had to tell a personal story, that of Haider, placing it within the complex political narrative of Kashmir. And he has successfully done so.

Haider is a beautiful film (or told beautifully) which manages to tell a personal story set in a political framework. Where the movie disappoints a bit is it at times bends over backwards to show the separatist movement in a positive light. You will see likable terrorists singing while grave-digging and shooting. 

No one should have any problem with this political lop-sidedness. It could well be the director's line of belief. But if he had explained the role of all the parties involved in Kashmir cauldron to the extent the plot warranted without taking political sides, Vishal Bhardwaj would have done a better job as a story teller. Instead, he chose the easier option. However, the redeeming point is that despite this political posturing, he has managed to tell the main story well. 

Haider is pursuing a PhD on revolutionary poets in India at Aligarh university, where he has been sent by his conniving paternal uncle (Haider’s father’s own brother) and mother so that Haider is not witness to their growing intimacy following Haider’s father’s disappearance engineered by his uncle who is an Indian army informer. Haider visits Kashmir in search of his father and gradually discovers how his uncle had laid out a plan to bring the downfall of his father and eventually get him arrested and killed. All to win over Haider’s mother.

The story unfolds in the first half amidst political problem, so that by the second half the political context is established with the viewer and the main story races up without the anchoring of politics around it. You can’t praise a film without the performances that make it possible. Haider’s transformation from an average guy to a terrorist has been enacted well by Shahid Kapoor… cold anger and determination come through very convincingly.

Transformation, in fact, is not unique to Shahid Kapoor’s character. Haider’s uncle played by KK Menon also undergoes a slow transformation, showing signs of repentance gnawing him from within even as he maintains his conniving exterior, trying to prevent things from sliding out of control as Haider is out to avenge his father’s death.

Although the song, dance, romance and loud comedy routine makes you feel it’s just another commercial movie, Haider has many redeeming qualities that make it worth a watch.

Reluctant Fundamentalist - a Movie Worth Watching

I had long wanted to read Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist but couldn’t get round to doing that before Mira Nair’s movie adaptation arrived. I watched the movie at the theatre last week. It’s both a thriller and a thoughtful film. It has all the trappings of a ‘sexy’ movie with drama, sex, romance and a fast-paced narrative and also an underlying tension, a constant anger and protestation.


The story starts with the kidnap of an American professor in Lahore. Following the kidnap Changez (the protagonist) is being interviewed by a CIA agent, masquerading as a journalist, involved in the search operation to find the professor and Changez is narrating his story starting a decade back in 2001, a year before 9/11 happened. The narrative moves back and forth taking the viewer through Changez years in the US and the modern day Lahore. Chanez’s past, in the US, explains the choices he made in life in the later years following 9/11.

Changez comes from a liberal Muslim family which is on a financial decline. Changez a bright chap goes to the US for studies and laps up a job in an investment banking company, a dream start to a career in the US. Similarly, Changez has a fulfilling emotional life: he is in a passionate affair and live-in with an artist (Kate Hudson). As Changez starts climbing the career ladder, 9/11 happens and his world starts changing and so does the world of Muslims in America. As Americans’ patriotism and schizophrenia rise making the land suddenly inhospitable to ‘outsiders,’ Changez goes through a series of experiences (humiliating frisking at US airport, being arrested for nothing by police etc) which leave him humiliated challenging all his preconceived notions about the US and his position in it as a Muslim.

And this inner churning gradually brings into sharp relief the questions of identities which had until now lain dormant in Changez. The more his Muslim identity (made aggressive by post-9/11 experience) asserts itself, the more mortifying Muslim-belittlements (made through conversations in office in surcharged post 9/11 atmosphere and general attitude towards them in the US) feel and the wider the cracks in Changez’s American dream get.

Finally an office visit to Istanbul pushes him off the cliff: he returns to New York, resigns his job and goes back to Pakistan.

The performances are very understated. There were enough opportunities for Changez (Riz Khan) to break out into an angry anti-West rant but he didn’t; yet the simmering anger comes through effectively.

But the most important aspect of the movie (or perhaps the book) is its emphasis on the fact that those outside the circle of fundoos who identify with the ‘Islam under attack’ phenomenon think it’s their identity (or people who share it globally or the lands they inhibit) which is under attack and not so much the religion. And it’s precisely how the occasionally drinking Changez who doesn’t give up his dalliance with alcohol even after embracing the cause of his faith/land/people - feels after 9/11. However, how Changez’s espousal of the cause is different from his other comrades across the world is that unlike them Changez doesn’t believe in violence.

Life of Pi - a Movie That Disappoints and Delights

Generally newspaper reviews are my guide to which movie is watchable and which not. And I generally don’t find newspaper reviews misguiding. But this time I refused to agree with them. I watched Life of Pi on Saturday with high expectations and was left a little disappointed.

Pi Patel is growing up in Pondicherry where his father owns a zoo. When Pi is 16, his father decides to migrate to Canada with his family for better business prospects. The zoo animals will be sold there. On their voyage to Canada, their ship, a Japanese liner, finds itself in a storm and sinks leaving Pi’s parents dead and Pi floating on the Pacific on a lifeboat with four animals, a Royal Bengal tiger, hyena, an orangutan and a zebra. The hyena kills the orangutan and zebra and the Bengal tiger slays the hyena becoming the only animal on the boat sharing it with Pi. The story is being narrated, in flashback, years later, by a grown-up Pi to a writer.

The movie is around one-and-half-hours long and what I outlined occupies just 40 to 45 minutes of the movie.

The rest of the movie is about Pi and the tiger negotiating different challenges on the sea in what seems like ceaseless sea wandering. That’s my problem with the movie. Since the time the ship meets with a shipwreck till the time Pi and the tiger make it to an island, there is no story, only some adventures which make for excellent visual experience but fail to prevent you from feeling – great, but where is the story headed. Actually the problem is not with the story; the problem is with how it has been structured. I don’t know how the story pans out in the book and how much of it has been changed for the movie. But the movie doesn’t work beyond the shipwreck until they reach the island.

I think, instead of telling the story in a linear form, starting where it starts and ending where it ends, if the movie had started from the point where the Patel family boards the liner, and then moved the narrative back and forth in time showing their present with brief visits to their past to substantiate their present - then the empty space from the shipwreck to island wouldn’t have stared at you for 45 minutes. And because of the background narration by the grown-up Pi, the back-and-forth style would have worked just fine.

However, to dismiss the entire movie only for those 45 minutes would be cruel. The movie has many delightful moments created with the aid of technology. When Pi is in a caste-away mode floating aimlessly on the ocean, there are some breathtaking scenes – and they leap (thanks to 3D) at you to break the monotony. The scene that particularly stands out is when after a while on the sea, after facing a few hurdles and having overcome them, when Pi seemed set for a hassle-free journey, a huge whale loops up sending Pi’s coracle up in the air on its way up, tossing his stock of tinned food up and then down into the water. The screen blacks out only showing the whale while it's under water and then lights up as the giant leaps out of the surface.

For children, these scenes are breathtaking; they will surely delight adults, but they may want a little more than them out of the film.

The movie is worth a watch and a repeat only for the visual effects and nothing else.