Bharat: A National Disaster of Storytelling

'To understand just one life you have to swallow the world,' This is not something that Ali Abbas Zafar's Bharat suggests to its audience; rather it is a confession made by the protagonist of one of the most memorable novels of all time. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was not just about what its title meant, a bunch of children born exactly at that twilit moment when India woke up to freedom. It was also an overwhelmingly larger-than-life, suitably epic and even irreverently picaresque portrait of a country and a subcontinent finding its awkward, stumbling footing after independence and partition mirrored in the alternately trivial and melodramatic domestic upheavals of its protagonist Saleem Sinai's charmed and cursed existence.

It is also everything that Bharat aspires, in its lazy, distracted way, to be but comparing Zafar's sloppily crafted film to Rushdie's magnum opus and post-modernist classic, or even to the more low-key Korean film An Ode To My Father, does not make sense, really. Even without the somewhat unreasonable expectations, this is a cinematic catastrophe that deserves no pardon. Everything, from storytelling and characterisation to even a basic portrait of the changing milieu of the country with whom the titular protagonist shares his nam, is merely flimsy window dressing for the incredulous superstar on the screen to shove aside mercilessly. 

That he does inevitably, merely by the dint that he is played by Salman Khan, an actor whom it is impossible to take seriously anymore, so bloated is his on-screen visage on his own self-aggrandising celebrity status. We begin with his bulking and huffing and puffing Bharat, looking hardly convincing as a gruff septuagenarian who grunts and frowns at a family of people played by refreshingly unfamiliar faces who, regrettably, have nothing to do at all in the film. How could they? This is all about him. 

His story begins on a somewhat promising note, even though by now we have had enough of more genuinely tragic cinematic stories staged against the tumult of the Partition. We have seen it all now: a son swears tearfully to take care of his family moments before his father disappears forever. Still, at least in these few initial reels, Zafar's film is humming comfortably in an assured narrative direction that makes way for a full-fledged potboiler, true to the masala roots of Manmohan Desai and Manoj Kumar. But what follows instead is neither here nor there, a banal, often shoddily scripted film that jars because there is no rhythm or flow here. At one moment, there is the silliest of slapstick, at another, there is yet another blatant, misguided public service announcement. 

All of it is also incredibly exasperating, rather than entertaining. At a hundred and sixty-seven minutes, Bharat plods on and on, digressing into unfunny situations and asides with badly etched caricatures and with a bunch of forgettable songs. The mediocre quality of the film's potential entertainment value and slipshod, anachronistic production values are not the only areas where the film wastes away all the talent involved. Zafar, vying vainly and amateurishly for overarching ambitions, crams in too many side players to Bharat's odyssey through many a shoddily recreated timeline and yet none of them have anything substantial to do than just throw in silly jokes for what their money's worth. There is a supporting ensemble, all right, but save for Sunil Grover's sidekick trying his valiant best to be this film's Nawazuddin Siddiqui, pretty much everyone gets shortchanged. 

Veterans like Kumud Mishra, Brijendra Kala and Satish Kaushik are reduced to cartoonish roles that are either inexplicably smug or nonsensical, an unnecessarily ill-clad Disha Patani romps around for about five minutes or so, thrusting her svelte body vigorously to no alluring effect and as for Tabu's much-touted cameo, it only reminds us that an actress of her calibre has no business being in such drivel. 

And then there is Katrina Kaif, probably one of the more annoying things in a film that fizzles out too early and becomes a tedious bore. In an attempt to make her Kumud as a straight-up and sassy woman, both Zafar and Kaif ham atrociously and the result is a painful, even grating heroine who is more frustrating instead of being a welcome foil to Bharat's cloying earnestness. It does not help that she is given large, badly written chunks of dialogues to mouth; the vain effort to be taken seriously as a performer is too much of a tall order for the lady. 

In Rushdie's novel, the tumultuous and even doomed arc of Saleem Sinai's life is held up as a looking glass, both magical and morbid, of India's many initial promises nurtured, questioned in its forays into war, and then betrayed by the onset of the Emergency in the 1970s. Coming closer to cinema, the eponymous naive hero of Forrest Gump is carved out as a cast-iron model of incorruptible sincerity in an America that sheds a little of its innocence with every watershed cultural and political moment it witnesses. And in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, Colonel Candy's trenchantly English stiff-upper lip is tested by the increasingly complex realities of the wars that his country engages in. 

In Bharat, there is no such discerning or subversive insight to be found in its hero's single-minded showboating exploits. We are dragged along uninterestedly in his flaky, ridiculous adventures as a daredevil stuntman in a circus, a heroic worker in the oil fields of Arabia, an able-bodied seaman who outwits Somalian pirates and while all these episodes might have made for a rollicking time in a more enjoyably brainless outing, the film's mock-serious pretensions weight them down. We wait for some shred of insight to be found in his decisions and motives but we get nothing, except for chest-beating displays of patriotism (as evidenced by an awfully jingoistic scene when the audience itself is roped in to rise for the national anthem) and thick-headed, self-serving machismo. 

What is he then? As embodied by Khan's embarrassingly awkward performance that now fails to rouse any sense of fanfare, let alone convince, he is, at the most, full of the same superstar bilge that we, as a nation, end up nevertheless worshipping to no end. In one of the stray clever moments in the film, we are told that the 1990s saw the birth of not one but three superstars. That is all that we can glean from a film this randomly and carelessly directed, written and staged: we are forced, time and again, to swallow superstars, not characters or believable people. This time, it chokes us to death by boredom. 

My Rating: 1 Star Out Of 5

The Doomsday Clock Of Disappointment: Why We Don't Really Need The New Series Based on Watchmen

Some mere weeks ago, a whole community was flabbergasted at the travesty called the final season of Game Of Thrones. It not only betrayed the hopes and expectations of millions across the world, which was not the case with the insanely successful final Avengers film clearly, but it also reeked of the most ludicrous, risible form of lazy, hurried writing and directing. Most people bemoaned of slapdash character development, confused motives, anachronisms (and yes even Starbucks coffee cups found lying around) and, yes, even Daenerys Targaryen, the thrilling, enigmatic heroine of the series, not only going full-tilt psychopathic but also dying most forgettably in unheroic fashion. Sigh.

 I cite this recent instance because, while I have never belonged to that community, I can understand just what all those outraged comments, and that petition signed by thousands, were all about. HBO is now primed to unveil a new series based on Watchmen. Yes, Watchmen, that extraordinary literary achievement, that staggeringly larger-than-life and seminal graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. It might have sounded a promising idea in the beginning, albeit one tinged inevitably with skepticism, but as the recently unveiled teaser of the same proves, Watchmen is just not a good idea to be filmed on any screen, be it silver or small. 

Now, let this not be understood by some as heresy. I first read all the 12 issues of this sensational, stunning masterpiece back about 5 years ago and I simply could not help but salivate over it and devour it again and again, whenever time presented an opportunity. A dark-edged yet emotionally poignant satire on not just the flawed all-American concept of the costumed superhero but also the flawed dimension of America and its socio-cultural milieu spanning across disparate generations, Watchmen is, quite simply, the most prescient and powerful slice of Americana coming from England that not only paved the way for grown-up comics or subsequent works by other English peers like Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It also represented popular literature at its most profound, prophetic and politically and emotionally resonant.

A year later, my beloved gifted me the hardbound treasure trove of this great, great novel's Deluxe Edition and that made me feel an even stronger and more vehement form of selfish love, along with the fear that Hollywood, Netflix or any of those big, cash-churning entertainment factories, would unearth this raw, unfiltered raw of brilliance and influential storytelling and process it into some trashy, plasticky imitation, much like Snyder's film ten years ago, which I hate with a distaste as vehement as my love for the book. 

Now, out of nowhere, what seemed like a comfortably remote possibility has come true. HBO, which is already in cahoots of planning prequels to Game Of Thrones, has finally discovered this incandescent quartz and while it will always be impossible to eliminate the indelible traces that Moore and Gibbons' work left on us in its original shape and form, I fear that today's generation, a generation that was cultivated more on a superhero or grown-up fantasy film and television franchise and less on hardcovers and paperbacks, will lap this up, thinking it to be subversive. 

Let me return now to why this magnificent book would not be a good idea for a screen adaptation. To begin with, the material is just not cut out for the populist, mainstream sensibilities of both present-day TV and cinema. With the multi-million dollar franchises that Marvel and DC, both giants in the world of comics, have created, there would be, to put it bluntly, only space of lily-livered creativity, the kind that satisfies more popcorn-fuelled excitement than put up something truly extraordinary. 

Back ten years ago, for all the abysmal quality of the final product, it might have sounded like a brave attempt when Snyder, backed by two mammoth Hollywood studios, would go ahead and release a film adaptation that, to give it a little credit, would be about marginally as uncompromising as the source and in any case, quite a lot for the average cineaste accustomed to bloodless superhero films to digest. But in today's time, Hollywood would, God bless them, not even consider pouring in their best minds and talents to adapt a novel whose premise is inherently the very opposite of populism or even conventional popularity. 

That is perhaps why it has now found space on the small screen, undeniably a platform that is more encouraging and fertile to more subversive, unconventional storytelling, as evidenced by a spree of series that bust censorship boundaries in favour of telling a unique and incredible story. Damon Lindelof, best known for co-creating Lost, a legend of the small screen that itself owes some of its path-breaking ideas to Watchmen, is in charge of this project too but while he claims to be an absolute fanatic of the source, well, Snyder was one such fanatic too and we know very well that fanaticism does not translate necessarily into great adaptations. 

But then, as some might argue, isn't the new Watchmen series looking radically different from what we read or saw in the book? I concur indeed: the book certainly did not have a vigilante army wearing Rorschach masks; in any case, Walter Kovacs himself was never portrayed as an anarchist rallying up his followers but was rather a lone, sociopathic and bitter masked avenger who refused to compromise, even for dignity's sake. And while the inimitable Jeremy Irons might be something of a casting masterstroke as the sleek, smoothly malicious mastermind Adrian Veidt, this is not the world of Watchmen as we, fanatics, who can quote entire lines from the Tales of The Black Freighter verbatim and even wax eloquent about verses by Blake and Shelley and Daniel Dreiberg's fascination with birds or even remember the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello sprinkled at the end of the issues, have known for so many years. 

That is, however, the least of my complaints. As I will always maintain, as long as an adaptation comes daringly close to the complexity and subversion of the source, it will be worth my money, regardless of the detours and digressions from the original that it would take. Change the plot, tweak the characters, do whatever you want to and everything would be welcome as long as these decisions make sense and materialise into an actually worthy final product that also enhances the experience of reading the source too. If this new series can do it, betraying my skepticism, I would lovingly hold it up as a companion to the book. But there is a slim chance of that, which brings me to the most crucial reason why any adaptation, be it a reworking or a faithful retelling, of Watchmen is bound to fail. 

That reason is redundancy. Simply put, we don't really need an adaptation or even a reinterpretation of Watchmen. There are novels and tragedies that, timeless as they are, are befitting of being adapted to the present day milieu, to bring in a refreshing perspective, an approach without ruining the rich brilliance of the source. There are other books like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the more politically charged and metaphysical of Graham Greene's work, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or even Daphne Du Maurier's intricate, dazzling stories, that refuse to be shoehorned into another storyteller's vision, unless that it is a storyteller with both integrity and ingenuity. Watchmen is clearly one of the latter novels and while an argument has been made for more visionary storytellers like David Cronenberg and Terry Gilliam bringing it to motion-picture life, they have all honourably given up on the impossible task, acknowledging thus the untouchable brilliance. 

And yet, even citing everlasting literary brilliance is not enough. Aren't there more than the necessary number adaptations of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker and Agatha Christie? Fine, but as evidenced by why we are yet to have a worthy adaptation of Midnight's Children, The Power and The Glory or even A Farewell To Arms, it is less of a question of brilliance and more of a self-awareness among filmmakers that literary brilliance cannot be rivalled or even improved upon. The vision presented by the raging, explosively brilliant mind of Moore and the gritty, vivid artistry of Gibbon's panels is complete and crystallised, not to be tampered with. Yet, unnecessarily, DC went ahead relentlessly and green-lit not only the disappointingly anticlimactic Before Watchmen series that is considered as something of a joke by most worshippers, but also figurines and T-shirts. Even Veidt would not approve of it. 

So, we don't need a Watchmen series right now. In fact, we don't need any more adaptations of this flawlessly brilliant work. It is high time since we stopped believing that Snyder's film had a better ending (I cannot understand how is that possible) or whether an alien invasion was necessary or even if Rorschach's journal will ever be published. Why can't we be happy with the treasure that we have in our hands already?