Highway to Hell | The Express Tribune

KARACHI:

In Asim Abbasi’s latest OTT release Barbagwhich premiered its first episode on Friday, Salman Shahid plays the affluent Jafar Khanzada, who is all set to marry the spirit of his deceased lover, Mahtab (Anika Zulfikar). To mark the occasion, he calls upon his two sons, Shehryar (Fawad Khan) and Saifullah (Fawad M Khan), while Sanam Saeed plays the enigmatic Scheherezade, Jafar’s caretaker-slash-daughter figure.

Dressed in a warm, misty blue-green and orange palette, cinematographer Mo Azmi’s atmospheric work brings to life a perpetual melancholy. More than creepy, the unnatural bond between human and ghost is a well-crafted reminder of the delicate intimacy of ghost movies.

Together with Azmi, Abbasi transforms the lush Hunza Valley setting, full of rich, fiery autumn leaves, into his most autonomous work yet. Even those who are hard to impress can approve Cake And Churails‘ visual style, peppered with plenty of famous shot recreations for cinephiles to spot. If Abbasi’s style in his last two offerings was taken as a film buff himself, with Barbag The filmmaker finally builds his own vocabulary.

Perhaps this is why, while the quiet town where Jafar has built his dazzling tourist attraction protests his growing eccentricities, Barbag feels far from “unnatural.” Unlike the poor and displaced in Abbasi’s earlier stories, who often form unnatural alliances with those in power. Whether it’s his 2018 debut, Cakewho spins a light drama out of the generous sacrifice of a Christian nurse for a feudal family. Or the elite women of Churails who forget the protocols of high society and find a sister in their housekeeper.

Cinema for the rich?

For a man whose cinematic universe centers the rich in dramatic proximity to the poor, Abbasi is one of the few directors to reproduce the signature Pakistani trope on the contemporary local scene. True, Abbasi’s wealthy characters do not indulge in corny platitudes, nor do the poor in his world bear the burden of moral rectitude. But sheer class inequality, made even more vulgar, is a page lifted straight from Pakistan’s cinematic history.

The small screen has also promised to tell half of its stories between seth sahab ka larka And mazdoor paisha walid sahib ki larkiwhere the tables are turned at their most daring. There is much to lament about TV’s malnourished production design, the sad monotony of sets where only one fails. Often it seems that the beloved industry has three houses in rotation to highlight the socio-economic particularities of a manager, a chauffeur and a poverty-to-riches businessman.

There are many ways to belittle the impoverished world-building of Pakistani television, but to find echoes of earlier blockbusters in it is descriptive at best. Class on screen has not come without the baggage of moral qualifications. In the Tehzeeba rich, self-righteous Shahid, complains with Laga Hai Husn Ka Bazaar as he watches his wife, a village-bred Rani, succumb to the pleasures of modernity. The writing is on the wall for those who care to see.

Five years later, Waheed Murad will wear a thick scarf in his mansion in Zubaida and reprise the role of the living room patriarch. The one who lectures both the deviant woman, Babra Shariff in this case, and the moviegoer on the behavior of respectable families. A message that was taken with the necessary seriousness.

Rich in theme and aesthetics

Abbasi’s world is rarely sanctimonious in the style of 1970s and 1980s cinema, but his portrayal of class is always the main spectacle. It is accurate to say that the filmmaker “reproduces” these socio-economic anxieties, as opposed to television’s “drumming up” of the outdated high of virtue signaling.

Call it the death of media literacy due to digital influx, the cinema of escapism has been displaced by the politics of relatability. Till my childhood, it was fantastic and natural for Karan Johar to land Rahul’s helicopter at the palatial Raichand estate.

The greatness of K3G feels overdone now. Times and sentiments have changed. Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 drama Parasite is one of the most popular lucid insertions in this common man cinema. And make no mistake. The common man is more fashionable now than ever. Not that Abbasi seems to care.

It is not that a story about the excesses of the upper class is necessarily a boring subject. From Luis Buñuel’s The Destroying Angel to Govind Nihalani’s PartyArthouse cinema has produced many successful polemics against intellectual and economic elites. Much less often do you see the spectacle of wealth characterize an entire emerging body of work.