Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Haider
2014 · Vishal Bhardwaj · Haider on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how small people look against the snowfields. (camera)
Pankaj Kumar frames wide, setting figures against white expanses and gray stone. The camera holds still or glides slowly. The valley outlasts whoever is standing in it.
Payoff: The landscape is not scenery. It presses on every scene with an indifference the characters cannot argue with.
Watch for white, gray and red, and almost nothing else. (light)
The grade holds a bleached, near-monochrome tone: snow, stone, and blood when it arrives. The hospital and the interrogation rooms are lit cold and clinical, with no warmth allowed in.
Payoff: The palette makes the film readable at a glance. It also refuses you any comfort from the picture.
Look at the checkpoints, the phiran, the kangri, the shrines. (setting)
Bhardwaj and the Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer pack the film with local particulars. Politics seeps into domestic rooms: frisking at a doorway, papers, soldiers in the lanes. Peer appears as a man who will not enter his own home unsearched.
Payoff: That specificity is what keeps this from being an abstract parable about violence somewhere.
Watch Tabu's face when Ghazala is near both men. (performance)
She plays Ghazala as neither villain nor victim, keeping your sympathy and your suspicion running at the same time. The film pushes the bond between mother and son well past what Shakespeare states.
Payoff: The heat of this tragedy comes from her ambivalence rather than from any scheme against anyone.
Listen for how often the film goes completely quiet. (sound)
Bhardwaj wrote the score himself and leans on Kashmiri and Sufi textures. Between songs he alternates snowfall and wind with sudden violence. The interrogation passages stay spare and let implication carry them.
Payoff: What the film declines to show or say is a large part of what it is reporting.
Once you have seen it
Track how long Haider waits before he does anything. (cutting)
Aarif Sheikh cuts elliptically and delays disclosures instead of dropping them as shocks. The truth about the father, and about Roohdaar, arrives in slow instalments. Hesitation is built into the rhythm.
Payoff: The editing makes you feel the delay instead of describing it. You end up waiting the way he waits.
Watch the Bismil performance and where Khurram is seated. (staging)
The number is staged with Khurram as its audience. It works at once as spectacle, as public accusation, and as the play within the play by which Haider goes after his uncle's conscience.
Payoff: A Hindi film song usually pauses the story. This one prosecutes somebody inside it.
Track what Ghazala says about revenge each time she says it. (structure)
She repeats that revenge only produces more revenge. Bhardwaj rewrites Shakespeare's finish around that sentence rather than clearing the stage with bodies the way the play does.
Payoff: The last decision in the film is the argument the whole picture has been making. Watch who declines to strike.
Carry this in: Watch the valley. Bhardwaj keeps the landscape in frame so a family's ruin and a region's read as one thing.