In parts, Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider replays keynotes from a classic Shakespearean dirge with a sly wink. So we are offered the jovial grave diggers. The skull gnashing its teeth in glee. The ghost who is not a ghost after all but is Roohdar..the keeper of another man's soul and secrets.
There is the undignified seducer with shifty eyes. The disgraced mother so in love with herself that she cannot resist stealing a look at her face in a broken mirror in the burnt shell of what was once her home. And the geographical context here is as appropriate as Mumbai's underworld was for Maqbool (based on Macbeth) and UP's hinterlands were for Omkara (based on Othello).
An ideologically divided Kashmir (in the timespan of 1994-1995) instead of Denmark is a stroke of genius because of its conflicted core..almost a mirror image of Haider who cannot accept anybody's version of his reality. And then the Indianisation of Hamlet begins.
A play within a film set to Gulzar's lyrics. Faiz's poetry (Gulon mein rang bhare...Baad-e-Nau-bahar chale.. Chale bhi aao ke gulshan ka karobar chale) wafting from prison cells where a humanist who once honoured life more than taking sides..is now waiting to die and to be avenged. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, now played by vendors of Salman Khan's films.
The real hero of the film is the writing because of the dark, unexplored places it takes you to.
Co-writer Basharat Peer takes off from his searing book Curfewed Night to take us by the scruff into the interrogation centres reeking with pain, the cinema halls where against the backdrop of a foolishly jumping Salman Khan, stand prisoners of an undeclared war, in chains, waiting for a bullet or another indignity.
To a region where identity is just a card and you must declare it satisfactorily in every street and checkpoint or you could disappear like the unaccounted for 8,000 Kashmiris.
The blindspot riddled Armed Forces (Special Powers Act is brilliantly turned into a soliloquy as Haider stands in a street square to ask the question, "Hum hain ya hum nahin?" Are we or are we not? This is another, more angsty version of Hamlet's cry of, 'To be or not to be.' So the all important question the film asks is, "What if you are not allowed to be? If everything you love is taken away from you? Do you avenge your losses?" Or as a wise patriarch played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda says in the film, can you find peace instead..by breaking out of the cycle of revenge?
So far..so brilliant. Also because unlike Shakespeare, Bhardwaj devotes special attention to his Gertrude, his Ghazala played with relish by Tabu. She is many things here. A suppressed wife afraid of her husband's idealism. The half widow who watches in horror as her man is hauled away by the security forces and her home is destroyed in one body blow. She is also the sexually deviant coquette who shares her brother-in-law's bed and clings to him even when he orchestrates her son's departure from her life. She is naively power hungry and likes to control all the men in her life and threatens to kill herself if they cross her will. Her final hurrah, reminiscent of a similar climax in Gulzar's Hu tu tu seals the fact that she wants to have the final word, always.
Shahid Kapoor's Haider is far less complex than Hamlet though. He is just a grieving son looking for some answers and then revenge through the maze of relationships that stalk and disable him. He is also a jealous son half in love with his mother's beauty ("aapko baantne ka jee nahin karta," he tells Ghazala once) and also repelled by her because he can see her destructive flaws. But he is pain and loss and anger and manic hate and compellingly so.
There is poor Ophelia, reborn as the wide-eyed Shraddha Kapoor's Arshi who starts out promisingly as a strong journalist but dissipates into a mess and is then speedily disposed off. Kay Kay is vile to the last convincingly spoken lie and you expect nothing less from him. It is however Irrfan as Roohdar, the gifted Narendra Jha as the wronged father and Shahid who have the most emotional heft.
At the wee end of the second half, Bhardwaj gets a bit reckless with all the goodies at his disposal. He begins to juggle the musical interventions, the scenic interludes, a love track, a revenge track, a bit of politics and a lot of Tarantino in the overdrawn climax where bodies and limbs lie in pools of blood in pristine snow and bullets fly relentlessly till you no longer care just who outlives the mindless siege.
This could have been a much greater film if the visual drama (though captured brilliantly by Pankaj Kumar) had not overtaken the story in the end. And if Bhardwaj had remembered to make the middle and end as compelling as the first half. Still the film gives you more to think about than most of the films that have hit the Rs 100 crore mark this year. Even though it ends without a punchline.