ELEGIAC EXCURSION INTO KNOW-MAN'S LAND

Highway

STARRI NG: Randeep Hooda, Alia Bhatt

D IRECTOR: lmtiaz Ali eing in the world th i s enchanting film inhabits is like being in the state of a waking dream. The world is fatally flawed. But it's also beautiful in spite of the deep flaws, or maybe because of them? lmtiaz Ali's new intriguing work takes us into the heartland of India, much in the same way thatJab We Met and to a lesser extent Rockstar did. lmtiaz loves his India. With all its gigantic contradictions, anomalies and aberrations.

And Veera, the arresting protagonist of Highway, is an anomaly herself.

Alia's performance nails Veer a with a persuasiveness that belies her two-film old history. Veera is a girl ridden with complexities and contradictions. Wealthy and spoilt, in a superbly staged highway drama, she is k idnapped on the eve of her wedding by a hood, played by Hooda with his habitual clenched intensity

The rest of the narrative is pretty much in character with what we expect in a film that constructs its wistful fable out of the harsh reality of the ailment known as the Stockholm Syndrome. Goi ng by the book of"How To Fall In Love With Your Kidnapper': Veera promptly falls for her scowling kidnapper whose associates (played effectively) conveniently fall off the plot's radar to leave the lovers alone.

WhetherVeera genuinely feels a love or whether that love is born out of defiant rejection of the life of I uxury and affluence, we will never know

As played majestically by Alia, Veera appears to be a bundle of snarled contradictions, some compelling, others purely annoying

At times we feel she is doing what she is doing and behaving in that gratingly headstrong manner only to get even with the Iife that she wants to leave behind. Highway is riddled with ironies, not necessarily intentional. Veera falls in love with Mahabir s angst-laden past, but is aware she has no future ahead with him. A responsible director can't be accused of glorifying a life of crime. Hence in the end, the entire premise of the l ove story, constructed with painstaking intensity, falls apart al l of a sudden, leaving us with a sense of emptied-out expectati ons

But the journey, while it lasts, is exhilarating and even inspiring. No Bollywood fi lmmaker shoots the Indian heartland with the aesthetic affection of l mtiaz Ali. On this occasion, he has cinematographer A nil Mehta capture the sand and the snow, the angst and the ecstasy in enrapturing welters. Mehta is the magician behind the film's textured feel.

No other actress could have played Veera with such infectious passion as Alia, who breathes fire and l ife into every moment of her screen time. Luckily, she is there almost across the entire length and breadth of the narrative imbuing the canvas with tender glory and slender strength

A l ot of the film's blemishes -for example, the predictability of the plot and the rather strained attempts to introduce an element of grim social realism, are covered up by the sheer spontaneity of the main performance

Matching Alia's fearless portrayal is the director who stea ls up into her dar kest secrets and then allows the character to smell the air's freedom in a world where the stench of decadence is a given You can't escape corruption and violation except when thrown together with someone who is as violated as you are This is what Veera 's tale ofroad romance seems to say

In some vita l ways, Highway resembles Gyan Correa' s Gujarati masterpiece The Good Road. One sequence where the kidnap victim helps her kidnappers escape detection by the police at a checkpoint on the highway is almost interchangeable in the two films.

In Correa'sfilm you could empathi se with the child protagonist's growing attachment to the truckers In Highway, it's real ly hard to be one with the wayward Veera's heart.

Randeep Hooda is in fine, if somewhat typecast, shape Though his accent is distracted from his performance, the character's pain made itself apparent through its mawkish mother-fixated

past- history

It's tough, if not impossible to make a politica ll y correct fi l m about a rich girl fal l ing in love with her kidnapper. To a very large extent, Highway manages to trave l a credible road, letting the sleeping dogs li e by simply believing in Veera's truth (fo r whatever it may be worth )

Admi r ably, lmtiaz Ali is not afrai d of silences. The sound design by Resul Pookutty is r ich in the sounds of nature. The bubbl e of the brook, the chirp of a b ird, the groan of a tired sou l and breaking of a heart, are all tangible. A special menti on must be made of the texture of incidental noises on the soundtrack and the quality of the folk songs that play in the background as Veera and her kid napper traverse a spectrum of cultures in search of... what??? We really don't know!

At the end, we are left with a deeply dissatisfyi ng fi l m whose very incompl eteness lends a sense of beauty to the narrative.

SUBHAS H K. JHA