Barzakh: A fable less ordinary about a world yonder
- 22 Jul 2024
Saibal Chatterjee, award-winning film critic
Powered by a sensibility that sets him free to explore worlds and zones that are way beyond the mundane and the fully effable, British-Pakistani filmmaker Asim Abbasi has delivered another exceptional work – a surreal, innovative drama series that thrives on the imagined and the unseen. The cast of Barzakh (“Limboland”), Abbasi’s second web series, is led by Pakistani heartthrob Fawad Khan (whose fan following in India is considerable), Sanam Saeed and veteran actor Salman Shahid (seen in Bollywood films like Kabul Express, Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya back in the days when the Mumbai industry embraced imports from across the border with open arms). Barzakh was filmed in the picturesque Hunza in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region. The mountains, the vales and the stunning vistas around them loom over – and in the backdrop of – many of the frames diligently composed by cinematographer Mo Azmi (who also shot Abbasi’s debut feature Cake and first web show Churails).
The location plays a significant part in creating the ambience for a powerfully inventive, visually hypnotic fable of love that is out to defy the end of life and the agony of an unfulfilled promise. A 76-year-old resort owner invites his estranged children to his “third and final marriage” to a woman who has been dead for 60 years, his “one and only true love”. The man’s younger son, an expectedly sceptical Shehryar (Fawad Khan), a psychiatrist who no longer practises, arrives with his precocious motherless son, who has a lively interest in the occult. The elder one, Saifullah (Fawad M. Khan), grappling with unresolved emotional issues, also makes it to his father’s upcoming wedding.
As they wait for the night when the moon will turn blood-red and worlds will collide, Saifullah develops a bond with the resort’s Italian chef Lorenzo (Franco Giusti). The brothers have pasts that they would rather not recall.
A young woman, Scheherezade (Sanam Saeed, one of the stars of Abbasi’s Cake), whose presence in the old man’s abode and her influence over him are shrouded in mystery, is already well ensconced in a household under siege in more ways than one.
“The story of our souls is inseparable from the magic of our lands,” says a key character of Barzakh. Her words – and her presence and the lack of it – constitute the ideational leitmotif of the series.
Working with plot points that hover between the dead and the living, the past and the present, the felt and the illusional, Abbasi crafts a supernatural fable of loss, longing and redemption that is at once confounding and strikingly evocative.
Barzakh abounds in emotions that can barely be explained, let alone analysed. Everything that has ever existed always exists, Scheherezade says to Shehryar. That echoes what the latter’s son asserts: “Nobody dies. We are all this big ball of energy.”
The old man, fighting off the dread of forgetfulness, insists “I will meet her, she will come.” He asks Scheherezade: Won’t she?
Two episodes of Barzakh began streaming on Zee5 and Zee TV’s Zindagi channel on YouTube on Friday. Four more chapters will be unveiled over the next two weeks – on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The show marks Fawad Khan’s return to Indian screens after an eight-year hiatus. And there is speculation already that the Pakistani star will soon make a return to mainstream Bollywood, too. He did his last Hindi films – Kapoor & Sons and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil – in 2016.
Barzakh is Abbasi’s second series co-produced by Zindagi’s Shailja Kejriwal, who also backed Churails (2020), about four women who start a detective agency to bringing cheating husbands to book.
Barzakh is set in the “Land of Nowhere” and plays out in Mahtab Mahal, a mansion that has seen better days. One the rooms of the crumbling resort stands on “a heap of bones”.
The villagers, who lament the loss of their ancestral land to the lure of material progress, are on a collision course with the reclusive Jafar Khanzada, whose sole regret in the autumn of his life is that he failed to keep a promise he made to Mahtab (Anika Zulfikar).
Barzakh is a departure from Cake and Churails in terms of substance but in the matter of craft and creative credo it extends Abbasi’s penchant for the unusual. Parts of the new show evoke memories of the three siblings in Cake struggling to deal with their own demons.
Churails was located in the here and now and addressed urgent themes in groundbreaking ways and with a wildly off-kilter style. Barzakh moves into terrain governed by precepts and beliefs that do not spring from the instantly believable but are invigoratingly engaging nonetheless.
Abbasi’s is clearly a voice that is impossible to define in one word – it is malleable, free-spirited and grandly ambitious. One adjective that springs to mind is fearless. Abbasi isn’t afraid to foray into tricky and unknown domains despite the inevitable uncertainty of the outcome of that exercise.
In an interesting scene in Barzakh, Shehryar tells his son that it isn’t love or happiness that lie at the core of human endeavour. It is fear that drives us all, he says, fear of being alone, fear of being unloved, fear of being inadequate. The boy promptly adds fear of the unknown to the list. That is the fear that Asim Abbasi and Barzakh draws sustenance from. As one character says, “I have no choice but to believe.” Spot-on. Barzakh raises questions, baffles with half-articulated answers and plunges into unplumbed, disorienting depths of the human soul. But in the end, the series possesses the power to carry the audience, bewildered yet bewitched, along.