At the halfway point in my six-episode binge of “Barzakh”, I was still deciphering what the series was actually about. Maybe it is a dysfunctional-family-reunion drama, kind of like director Asim Abbasi’s first feature “Cake” (2018) but with fantastical elements added for effect. Or maybe the fairytale-esque setting is a narrative device for a supernatural-feminist saga. Or it could be about death and longing. Or how grieving can heal childhood traumas. Or how the misreading of sacred scriptures could be used to justify extremist acts. Or “Barzakh” could be all these things and I would still take it, for how often do you see local folk tales reimagined, turned into a big-scale Indian production starring globally loved actors, for all the world to see?
Yes, “Barzakh” is all these things, and yet it retains the identity of none. The issue is not that it is snail-paced – one can argue that such pacing is supposed to be contemplative – but that Barzakh’s long setup never ends. The end feels anti-climactic which is not what you want to feel after enduring six hours of the show.
Set in the ‘Land Of Nowhere’, “Barzakh” is about the Khanzada clan. The patriarch Jafar Khanzada (Salman Shahid) invites his two grown-up sons, one from each of his two wives, to his third and final wedding. The bride is a 16-year old Mahtab (Anika Zulfiqar), his first love who is not quite alive. The elder son Saifullah (Muhammad Fawad Khan) lives alone and runs a mango farm, while the younger one, Shehryar (Fawad Khan) is a widower who arrives with his 9-year old son Haaris. There is also Scheherezade (Sanam Saeed), Jafar’s caretaker who also runs his resort, Mahtab Mahal, a grandiose palace draped in warm autumnal tones, overlooking the rock-hewn village. Then there is Jafar’s younger brother, Jabbar (Sajid Hassan) , a ringleader popular among local villagers, who isn’t quite happy with his brother’s upcoming wedding. The sons suffer from a very trendy condition of having an emotionally unavailable, dismissive father.
The Land of Nowhere is a majestic valley, strewn with peaks and groves and imposing trees submitting to Fall. Captured exhaustively by Asim’s longtime collaborator, Mo Azmi, the place is imbued in burnt oranges, ambers and rust-colored leaves. Every frame feels like an illustration from a children’s storybook. The treatment makes it one. The series is divided into chapters, each resembling a title from yesteryears’s fairy tales. Our narrator Scheherazade reframes the events in “Barzakh” as mythical fables of kings, princesses, devils and fairies. There is even a Book of Nowhere, excerpts of which start and end each episode, which turns the unfolding action in the middle into prophesied parables.
One thing is clear. “Barzakh” sure can tell. This show buries itself under the duty of having to explain, with exposition dumps, with verbose voiceover, with prolix Urdu dialogue which sounds like someone google-translated it from english, with the ‘insiders’ endlessly exhorting their lore to the uninitiated ‘outsiders’, with conversations that turn into statements, with emotions that quickly turn into words.
The result is that characters in “Barzakh” talk too much – because how else are we supposed to understand such a complex setting? It is ironic that in a drama that had spirits and shamans and magical trees, I was rooting for the skeptic Shehryar, the naysayer, to be right. Every-time Fawad Khan mockingly raises an eyebrow in the face of Scheherazade’s posturing, I wanted him to be proven right at the end, to emerge as a winner in a land where people insist on sounding different kinds of hypnotized. I wanted Jafar’s stubbornness to be a result of aging and dementia and not to be some cosmic sign from his lover on the other side. I wanted the white-robbed spirits carrying rocks at their backs to be just delusions of those living and grieving.
Asim over directs these theme-shouting elements so much that after a while, “Barzakh” becomes a ponderous dreck and even with breath-taking imagery, one starts longing for visual diversity in the story. I wished it was a two-hour long movie or at least two episodes shorter so that Asim’s unfettered creativity could be curtailed for good.
The series boosts a stellar cast that injects some intensity into a largely inert screenplay. Sanam Saeed is perfect as someone whose blankness is supposed to be a mystery. Fawad Khan shines in the brief spurts of rage but is mostly confined to sarcastic sniggering. It is unfortunate that his backstory is told in the fourth episode, by which time Barzakh’s default emotion looks like a sad face emoji. Both Khushh Khan, who plays young Jafar and Salman Shahid are spot on in portraying a selfish, ambitious man who becomes insufferably obstinate when fate snatches away one thing he really wanted.
Tragically, it is Muhammad Fawad Khan’s Saifullah, who is most gripping in his ache. He is a loner, a sad sack, struggling with more than his sexuality, and who blossoms after befriending a free-spirited Italian chef. In his presence, throwaway lines like, ‘Thanks for liking my mangoes.’ and ‘You like them old.’ become touching and transform Saifullah’s story from sad-piano into a tragicomic thriller.
Others aren’t that lucky. Fawad Khan is given lines like, ‘you were the life of the party’ in a scene where his wife refers to one of his patients as a client. There is also a drug-induced soiree where father and sons theatrically confront each other, making me question what was the point of this existentially ambitious setting with high-minded ideas about life, death, and rebirth when all it took was some shrooms to do the trick?
Ultimately, “Barzakh” is unable to sustain the potential of its one-liner, that of an old man and his dead bride-to-be. The carefully choreographed frames, long lateral tracking shots, immaculately arranged camera motion, ambient score and visuals quirks – that might remind one of Wes Anderson – feel like vintage vacuum thanks to the whims of patronizingly sentimental writing. It mistakes trauma for complexity, making characters stalk the past rather than the other way around. Towards the end it is the viewers who are stuck in a limbo (barzakh), one side is exasperation, on the other, dismay.
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