Maqbool Review

Starring Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri Piyush Mishra, Masumi Makhija, Ajay Gehi

Written by by Vishal Bharadwaj & Abbas Tyrewalla

Directed by Vishal Bharadwaj

Rating: ***1/2

Tortured lives, anguished faces, brooding crime and reverberating punishment ….Welcome to the underworld according to music composer turned director Vishal Bhardawaj. From Francis Coppola’s Godfather trilogy to Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and Company …you’ve probably seen scores of great and not-so-great films on the wages of gangsterism.

Maqbool transports us to a threshold of pain and redemption hitherto unknown to Hindi cinema. Because this is Shakespeare’s Macbeth trans-located to Mumbai’s underworld, and because Bharadwaj has selected a dream cast to portray his nightimarish world of crime and retribution, Maqbool takes its emotional content beyond any other film from the genre.

The writing on the wail is so clear coherent and redemptive, even Shakespeare would smile indulgently at the artistic liberties Bharadwaj has taken with the original text. Maqbool lays open a whole new universe of passion- play, unexplored in the original text. Bharadwaj reveals the politics of lust and passion with a surehandedness seldom witnessed in Hindi cinema.

Hence the ‘King’ from Shakespeare becomes a doddering paunchy underworld kingpin Abbaji(Pankaj Kapur) whose ethereal ‘Lady Macbeth’ is Nimmi(Tabu) whose passion for Abbaji’s most trusted lieutenant Maqbool(Irfan Khan) rips her life womb and conscience apart.

Bharadwaj whose previous feature-film outing was the kinky kids’ flick Makdee with Tabu’s aunt Shabana, brings the niece to a level of performing scrupulousness that renders the general ‘acting’ in Hindi cinema redundant and overdone. Tabu ‘s Nimmi in some twisted way, reminded me of a long-forgotten film , B.R. Ishaara’s Log Kya Kahenge , that Shabana Azmi had done many years ago.

I haven’t forgotten the demoniacal look on Shabana’s face as she instigated her lover to murder her stepson. That stricken look returns in the fabulous form of Tabu as she provokes Irfan to get rid of her spouse who sprinkles sterility into her life and womb. Even in her most horrific moment of selfseeking Tabu preserves the ‘poetry’ of violence in her performance.

Yes, she’s remarkable. But to hold on to her ‘performance’ is to do injustice to the sublime and seamless quality of Bharadwaj’s Shakespearean voyage into the damned. Every actor builds a poetic life for his character and then plunges his own personality in the lucid lyrical angst of lives on the edge.

Unlike that other recent brilliant exposition on gangsterism Company , Bharadawaj doesn’t abide by groundrules of Mumbaiyya underwordliness. The characters don’t spend ghalati time scampering through crowded narrow gullies with ghodas (guns) in their hands. Most often they’re confined to meticulously created locations where they don’t appear to have been airdropped just minutes before the camera rolled.

Hemant Chaturvedi’s cinematography particularly in the scenes capturing the dark guilt and inescapable atonement of the murderous lovers, is beyond anything imaginable in terms of cinematic expressiveness. However most of the film ‘looks’ like Ram Gopal Varma’s Company. Which truly, is a tragedy beyond, the Shakespearean one. Because many people would inevitably compare the two greats works on gangsterism.

Comparing Maqbool to Company is akin to comparing the voices of Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle. Each has its own raison d’etre and rhythm. Though Irfan’s character’s reverent regard for his mentor reminds us of Al Pacino with Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Bharadwaj’s take on the tormented destiny of the underworld is uniquely autonomous.

The director packs in an astonishing density and some tongue-in-cheek barbs at Bollywood’s notorious links with the underworld. This film requires and commands very close viewing. There are invisible driving forces guiding the character’s to their final nemesis.

The screenplay constructs a pyramid of pain with a cyclic inevitability. We know these outlaws are doomed. But their journey to their imminent ruination still sucks us in. The structuring whereby two sets of love stories between Nimmi and Maqbool and Abbaji’s innocent daughter Sameera(Masumi Makhija) and Guddu(Ajay Gehi) is an ingenious method of projecting the two aspects of love, the murky and the unviolated.

When in the stunning finale the dying Nimmi asks Maqbool, "Was our love pure?" we’re looking at the underbelly of passion through an epic topshot lens where crime is simultaneously subjective and objective. In the way he projects emotions buried under the macho milieu, and also the austere use of his selfcomposed songs and music Vishal Bharadwaj demonstrates a narrative control that most filmmakers don’t achieve in a lifetime, let alone in their second film.

The performances do the rest. After Warrior Irfan Khan again dons the tormented conscience-stricken protagonist’s mantle. Khan’s Maqbool goes from stern selfdenial to tortured crime and retribution. It’s probably one of the best parts written in Hindi cinema for a leading man. Irfan clutches at his character’s throat and makes it articulate even its most inaudible emotions.

Pankaj Kapur is a revelation. His expressions of steely revenge melt into displays of utter compassion for his enchanting wife. Kapur corroborates Bollywood’s myopic disregard for its truly outstanding performers. There’s a glorious gallery of able-to-outstanding supporting performances by unknown actors like Piyush Mishra and Ajay Gehi(playing Masumi’s love interest). But Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri as buffoonish corrupt cops and narrators seem wasted in a films where every character epitomises the will to achieve the state of damnation as the only means to selfassertion.

Maqbool takes frightful risks with narrative devices and audiences’ tastes and comes out in triumphant colours of dark despair. The spirit of joylessness is celebrated in a language that’s poetic and pristine, hence, ironically, seemingly inapplicable to such soiled lives.