Film: "Qissa"; Cast: Irrfan Khan, Tisca Chopra, Tillotama Shome, Rasika Duggal; Director: Anup Singh; Rating: ****1/2
Set aside the badla that beckons at the boxoffice this week. "Qissa" is a killer.
All
our lives we try to be what we are not. Some of us lie about our sexual
orientation to ourselves or to others. In one way or another every life
is layered in lies.
"Qissa" is a film that strips through the
layers of subterfuge that living on the edge entails. The partition of
India ripped the country into two. In the film Irrfan, playing the
Sardar Umber Singh with majestic believability, walks across the border
with his family of a beautiful wife (Tisca Chopra) and three daughters.
The
fourth progeny is where the plot thickens. Obsessed with the idea of a
male heir, Umber invents a virtual life for his fourth born. She is no
longer a daughter. She is Umber's son Kanwar Singh who won't play with
dolls. But the dolls will continue to play with her, no matter how hard
her delusional father tries to fortify the growing femininity of his
daughter with aggressive clannish lies.
Anup Singh unfolds the
bewildering and bizarre tale with an inevitability that simply dissolves
all disbelief. In a society, culture and country that still favours the
male child as the true inheritor of the family lineage, the message
that "Qissa" conveys is both timely and timeless.
The drama
created in the screenplay(co-written by the director Anup Singh and
Madhuja Mukherjee) is so primeval,it threatens to collapse under the
weight of its own drama. The director balances out the incongruities
inherent in the theme with a great deal of compelling drama and primeval
passion.
You can't help being swept away by the deceit drama and
passion of "Qissa". Cinematographer Sebastin Edschmid shoots Punjab as
a hotbed of political cultural and emotional turmoil.
Not
surprisingly the last quarter of the narrative slips into a surreal
mode, as Umber, now dead, returns to confront the son he never had.
Finally the film is about the ghost of tormented guilt-ridden man trying
to come to terms with the wrong done to a son' he never had and A
daughter-in-law (Rasika Duggal) he should've never conned.
Irrfan's
shared screen-time with his gender-challenged daughter are structured
as a subverted tribute to the filial bond that ties all mankind.
Like
destiny , "Qissa" moves in unexpected ways. The performances specially
Irrfan's, lift the high drama to another level of articulation where the
characters appear to be conversing with their destiny without
Edschmid's camera peering into their souls. More than 70 percent of the
film is shot in the night, as though the dark recesses in the
characters' souls were seeking a way to express themselves outwardly.
Emphatically
evocative are the sequences where Tillotma Shome as Kanwar is locked
away in her father's crumbling ancestral home in Pakistan with his'
bride Neeli. As they try to figure out a way from his gender imbroglio, a
glowering state of doom and indignation gathers around the film.
You
know as well as the characters do that there is escape from the
patriarchal arrogance that Irrfan's character has unleashed on his
family. In some endearing way, the theme of patriarchal tyranny in
"Qissa" reminded me of Shoaib Mansoor's Pakistani film "Bol".
And
though Tillotama Sharma's gender challenged character never acquires
the resilient tragic contours of Hillary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry", she
brings a very high dose of credibility and poignancy to her character,
specially in her high dramatic sequence where her character stands naked
in front of her father's ghost asking him her true identity.
Rasika
Duggal as Shome's reluctant bride is deeply moving. And Tisca Chopra as
Irrfan's devoted wife who can't give her husband the one thing that
makes his life worthwhile, reminds us again of her staggering
versatility.
But make no mistake. "Qissa" gets the largest measure of its strength and glory from Irrfan.
Like
the ghost that follows the film's gender-challenged protagonist "Qissa"
will haunt you forever. It takes the patriarchal obsession with the
male heir to a level of lucid expression where geopolitical dislocation
and gender ambivalence are locked in a visceral embrace.
