Haider ***
Dir: Vishal Bhardwaj. With: Tabu, Shahid Kapoor,
Shraddha Kapoor. 161 mins. Cert: 15
The aptly surnamed
Vishal Bhardwaj is Bollywood’s go-to guy for Shakespeare updates, having turned
Macbeth into 2003’s Maqbool and Othello into 2006’s Omkara.
Here, he completes a boxset by relocating Hamlet
to chilly, militarised mid-90s Kashmir, with a hero (Shahid Kapoor) who returns
home from studying revolutionary poetry to learn his dissident father has
disappeared and his mother has taken up with a High Court official. There’s
surprising sense in staging the Mousetrap and gravedigger scenes as musical
numbers, and something compelling in how this backdrop forces the characters to
adopt explicitly political positions: even its Laertes equivalent obliges his
now journalist sister to swear her chastity on the Koran. Belatedly, it
unravels like this Ophelia’s terribly literal scarf: the last-act deployment of
rocket launchers reminded me of Arnie’s blunt-force Hamlet in Last Action Hero. Yet for two-and-a-half
hours, it makes the text feel newly alive, bristly, radical – a palpable hit,
in any language.
Haider opens in cinemas nationwide today.
No comments:
Post a Comment