Review : Vishal Bharadwaj's "Haider" is positively gobsmacking but only in parts.

Vishal Bharadwaj's Haider is one of the best Hindi films of the year, but it's also the weakest installment in his Shakespeare trilogy.

And it has further dethroned Feroz Abbas Khan's marvelously dark Dekh Tamasha Dekh as the ballsiest film of the year in spectacular fashion. No kidding, after two shockingly drab attempts at the outré, Bharadwaj returns to explore the ganglands and puts the Bard's eternal Hamlet at the nub of the Kashmir insurgency. 

Job well done. When it gets going, Haider is gobsmacking stuff. 

If there is one guy in the industry who knows how to deftly adapt a Shakespearean work without annihilating its brio, it is Bharadwaj, the brilliant Bard buff. Having already adapted two in the past with his moody and stunningly effective Maqbool and the cutting-edge revelation that Omkara was, it was a given that Hamlet, perhaps the Bard's most intricate oeuvre, would be next on the list. And what surprises me every single time is how exhaustively, intimately he understands the material. 

Haider explores the bowels of madness and depravity, but does so with a shimmering eye for sheer visual tantalization. It's a ravishing film, surging with spurts of dark comedy, brutal violence, yawning periods of inspired restlessness and plucky undertones. Like most of Bharadwaj's works, it is a film strictly for adults, but only for those who seek with a radical, inured mind. It begs oodles of patience from its audience, unwinds as lethargically as a funeral but remains the auteur's most assured work yet. 

In ways more than one, Haider is practically flawless, and yet the niggling flaws are vexingly discernible. 

The question is, could we forgive its flaws for its métiers?

I couldn't. There were stretches when I found myself getting too twitchy, but the utter virtuosity in a handful of sequences hinders the screenplay from falling apart, and it's a rather fragilely constructed one, if I may say so. And this particular discovery startled me; scripts are usually his forte. But here, Bharadwaj doesn't employ a taut narrative for his Hamlet, but opts for an ambling one. Many characters throng his steadily inconsistent screenplay, but hardly serve any purpose to the action. 

But what Haider succeeds in creating is a character study, a particularly edifying one. Richly atmospheric and detailed right down to the minutest detail, the characters, the dented souls that chew on the truth and endlessly brood over the atrocities that have glued themselves to their lives, give the film its soul. And what characters! Layers of emotion, lies and tragedy beneath the doleful, dead eyes, trying to comprehend the happenings in their land but failing to do so. And an almost incestuous relationship between a mother and her son; a dour touch, admittedly, but what a dramatic one and done so with a flourish! 

That's precisely what makes Haider a smashing success -- it blends a complex work of literature and the history of a forlorn state effortlessly.

But it's no masterwork, not even close to being one. It's not Bharadwaj's best. It's also not one of the finest political films we have made. We have made better. He has made better. 

But what it has is chutzpah -- a word that is frequently mentioned in the film and essentially means 'shameless audacity' -- and it's also one that describes it perfectly. Haider is a great act of chutzpah.