Movie Review: Haider

Its been a long time that I have come out of a movie theatre, affected. Given the kind of trashy movies that have been coming out of Bollywood recently (and becoming blockbusters!), Haider felt like it was from a different movie industry altogether! Before going for Haider, I had a vague idea that it was a mixture of Hamlet and Kashmir. But the way this was done completely blew my mind. We went for a 11pm show after a very busy day, and came out fully awake still, with my mind alert, awake and running in all different directions.



The movie starts with a Kashmiri doctor taken away by the army in Srinagar, as he was treating a terrorist in his house. His son, Haider (Shahid Kapur) looks for his father after he comes back to Srinagar and finds his mother (Tabu) cavorting around with his uncle, Khurram (Kay Kay Menon). Haider's searches lead him nowhere, while his mother gets more and more close to his uncle.



And then a stranger called Roohdaar (meaning ghost) comes to him with a message from his father who was incarcenated by the army and then killed. He says his father wants him to kill his uncle as he was the one who got him jailed and took his mother away.



Haider by this time starts showing signs of madness and is confused whether what Roohdaar told him was true or not; what should he do and who should he believe. So, when his mother and uncle get married, he stages a play (a beautifully lyricised and choreographed song - Bismil) displaying what he thought happened to his father. And seeing his uncle's reaction, he gets to know what he wanted to know.



What follows are a somewhat gory set of events - his uncle trying to kill him, him killing his two spy friends, killing his love’s father, and deciding to become a terrorist and go across the border to train. To meet the people who will help him do that, he goes to a cemetery to hide.

What follows in this last sequence is what I think took this movie many notches up. The sequence at the cemetery starts with a song, where old grave diggers are digging graves in the snow and singing cheerfully (what an irony!). They see Haider and say - 'Aao beta, apni kabar khodo aur usmein so jao!' - ‘Come son, dig your own grave and sleep in it’.



I think this is where the movie became more than just a Hamlet adaptation but a commentary about Kashmir. You start to wonder what all must the people of the state have gone through, that they can now joke about a grave situation like this…

What follows this sequence is mayhem - Haider, the gravediggers, his mother, his uncle - all are destroyed in the ensuing bloodshed. Isn’t that what is happening to Kashmir? No one can be the winner after all these killings and hatred and revenge.



By this time I was almost in shock - affected so much by all that was shown. This movie is such a masterpiece - rare in Indian cinema but nice to know that they can still exist. And using Kashmir as a background while showing the story of Hamlet has to be the work of genius. Flawed but genius for sure.



Once back at home, I continued reading up on the movie reviews - there were just so many of them, trying to uncover the many layers and subtleties of the plot, while others criticising the movie to no end. Both of them are right in their own right, as happens with great art - it can divide people and the same art can appear different to different people.


The movie has so many layers, it was fun to read about all its different interpretations. Some of them I found very interesting. For example, Tabu is supposed to signify Kashmir. Wanted by two opposing parties and between them, she gets destroyed in the end. And then there were the gravediggers - old men now fighting from the side of the militants. People at such an age don’t really get swayed by principles and causes. At such an age it has to be a personal reason, a son lost because of the crossfire which would make an old man take up arms. What must have happened in their lives that caused them to take up arms at such an age?

And the mother-son tension, it was present all through the movie and I kept wondering whether its really there or am I imagining it? The director did make it explicit by the end, but may have been better to have left that part unsaid. Would have been so much more effective!

I loved the movie, not because it told a true story, but because it told the story it wanted to - very well. The director and writer wanted to bring to light some of the things that the Indian state and army have done wrong in Kashmir and that it did. 



There is a lot of controversy that the movie shows the army in a bad light. And that the movie does, it just shows a lot of negatives and none of the positives. But does it have to? Does every movie have to be an unbiased documentary? We've had many patriotic movies showing just the other one-sided view. And this movie just chose to show the opposite in the same one-sided manner. Can we with our hand on our heart say that nothing shown in the movie is true? I think not. Even if its 5% of the truth, its still true. And we as a country need to grow up to it. If we accept our countless positives, we must embrace the negatives that come with it too.



I don’t support the torture shown in the movie, but I do know that there is no other way for an army to protect itself. If you are in a hostile environment, where any one of the civilians around can kill you and people who work with you, I can imagine them having to protect themselves by hook or by crook. Even in such a situation, I do understand that there are times when unjustified actions must have happened, and that is why a movie like Haider is good to shed light on such unwanted elements and acts. 


Its still difficult to see Haider as just a movie - it was a commentary on something happening in our country. Still I think it needs to be appreciated as a movie too. So I must say that the acting was above par. Tabu as always was mind-blowing. The pain in her face was sometimes just too tough to handle. Kay Kay Menon was his usual good self. Shahid did a decent job, I wouldn’t say he was in the same league as Tabu and Kay Kay but surely can get there. The rest of the cast too supported the movie ably, and the two Salman copy-cats deserve a special mention.

The songs sometimes felt unnecessary, but Bismil and So Jao are just fantastic. They get across the emotions of the moment so well, brilliant. The choreography of Bismil is worth a mention too - very energetic and Shahid does it full justice. The location for the song is pretty, a place I would like to visit. Apparently its an old Hindu temple in Kashmir, now long destroyed.

The movie also showed the filmmakers' love and appreciation for the beauty of Kashmir all throughout. Even though it was not a tourism pitch, Haider showcased Kashmir in all its glory, the aspect of its beauty that no militancy and no bombs can ever take away. The raw intrinsic beauty of a place so completely ravaged in the last twenty years. Sometimes that is what provided irony in the movie - such a paradise on earth, now splattered by blood and hatred and sadness.

At times it was difficult to understand whether this was a movie on Hamlet or Kashmir? Whether Kashmir was the background, or the mother-son-uncle story? The two are so much meshed together, that its tough to see one without thinking of the other.

As I said, watch the movie. You may not love it, but you cannot leave the theatre untouched.

Would give it 5 stars..



(This is too long a blog for a movie, and that was the reason for my resistance to write it - it was just such a complex and emotional experience for me. Maybe thats why movies like Bang Bang make money much easily!)