Asim Abbasi’s web series from across the border, Barzakh is the kind of big swing most cinephiles would want to unconditionally endorse. Born out of one’s unabashed love for stories, ambitiously conceived, thoughtfully designed, breathtakingly shot and impeccably performed, Abbasi’s six-episode series has most of the ingredients needed to make something memorable and singular. Unfortunately, one also wishes someone was around to tell the writer-director to rein in his ambitions, and offer some distant feedback for the stretches when the show is infatuated by its own eccentricities. The result is a show that feels seductive on paper, but never reaches the heights it was meant to.
Streaming on Zee5, Barzakh (meaning: limboland) is set in the ‘land of nowhere’. Everyone seems to talk in metaphors here, depending on their interpretations of a holy book called the ‘book of nowhere’ (a stand-in for the Quran).
The town is ruled by a businessman, Jafar Khanzada (Salman Shahid) a Dickensian, grumpy, bitter old man, who hates most people. There’s a good reason for it. When a young Jafar (Khushhal Khan) had left town to make something of himself, so he can earn a comfortable livelihood and provide for the love of his life — Mahtab (Anika Zulfikar) — he doesn’t know it is the last he will see her.
When he returns after many years and dozens of unanswered letters, he finds Mahtab has gone missing. The town is almost ghostly in its silence. No one tells him what happened to Mahtab, forcing him to assume the worst. Even in a fantastical setting, I bought Jafar’s resentment of the townsfolk. Shahid’s temperament is diametrically opposite to Khushhal Khan’s, with the former being acidic and spiteful, whereas the latter is cheerful and enterprising. It’s a stunning choice on Abbasi’s part to show how heartbreak fills a person with venom, making him an entirely different person over the course of a lifetime.
After Mahtab’s disappearance/death, Jafar loses his faith in goodness. This affects his two marriages, from which he bears two sons Shehryar (Fawad A Khan) and Saifullah (Fawad M Khan). The two sons are summoned when Jafar announces he will marry for a third time to the love of his life, Mahtab. The only problem is Mahtab has been long dead, these circumstances are revealed to us over the course of the show. The two sons, battling their individual traumas while growing up with a caustic, absent father, make one final effort to reconcile with their old man, feeling bad for what they believe is an undiagnosed condition of dementia.
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The beauty of Abbasi’s show is its sincerity to commit to the unknown. Even while risking sounding hokey through much of its dialogue, the show never tries to be resolvable. After all, human beings, like most other creatures, are gullible. They’re drawn to fairy tales that offer answers and comfort, but they’re also seduced to carry out their darkest impulses in a mob where they won’t be held accountable. It’s this complete range of the human condition — from kindness to barbaric (while trying to act along the ‘rules’ written in a holy book) — that seems to fascinate the audience. It also leads to the show being completely scattered, and this commitment to the ambiguities of the unknown means the show also often feels obfuscatory.
Shahid, who was marvellous in Kabir Khan’s Kabul Express is eccentric and cruel to a requisite degree. Fawad Khan, who hasn’t been seen on Indian screens since Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016) is tasked with being the reality check of the show. Each time a scene takes a flight of a fancy, it’s the job of Khan’s Shehryar to puncture it with cold logic and levity.
Khan’s Shehryar and his adolescent son, Haris, are grieving the untimely passing of Leena (Eman Suleman). Fawad M Khan, playing Saifullah, is a haunting character who chooses to repress his desire in exchange for his mother’s well-being and relatively functional family life. It’s a sacrifice that no one sees, forget acknowledging or reciprocating it. This makes Saifullah’s hurt that much more raw and real. Sanam Saeed, playing Jafar’s third child, Scheherezade, also his caretaker, gets a raw deal from Abbasi. Saeed’s role is the most underwritten one here, skirting the lines of a human and a being from another realm.
Unlike Abbasi’s last undertaking Churails (2020), which despite its ability to bite more than it can chew, was more confident and efficient in its storytelling, Barzakh meanders quite a bit. There’s an entire episode where Scheherzade infuses psychedelics into the food of Jafar, Shehryar and Saifullah, explained as a way for the father and his sons to exorcise their demons, almost feels like a filler episode. They all have their resentments, we get it.
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The metaphors in Barzakh feel heavy-handed beyond a point. Doves being squished with bare hands, the fairies lugging around a slab of stone tied to their backs, the circularity of a serpent devouring itself. There are a few stunning flourishes too, like the way Abbasi and his cinematographer Mo Azmi, depict a love-making scene by showing a woman squeezing a fruit and spilling its nectar on her lover’s back. It’s an indication of how subliminal Barzakh could have been, had the writer-director shown such imagination without alienating their audience with talks of spirits, shamans, fairies and paradise. The even-tempered conflict between Jafar’s feudalistic ways, and the brimming anger of the townsfolk, is a fascinating sub-plot that gets flattened out amidst all the verbose dialogue.
Abbasi’s Barzakh is a noble failure, an undertaking that tries to reach for the peak of Himalayan ranges, and instead ends up on the balcony of a resort overlooking those mountains. It tests our patience a bit before getting to the good stuff. It just wants to tell its story. In a time, when everything has become about fan-service, Abbasi’s show feels like civil disobedience, which is not the worst thing, if you ask me.
Barzakh is streaming on Zee5, with new episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
