‘Barzakh’ review: Leagues ahead of anything on the Indian streaming scene

Barzakh is streaming on Zee5, and — for free and in 4k resolution — on Zee Zindagi’s YouTube channel. I’m glad the show is available outside of a single streaming service, because in terms of ambition and aesthetic, Barzakh is leagues ahead of anything we have seen on the Indian streaming scene. This is a novelistic, fantastical story of love and death and singularity, a story that takes its time to build its own world and fill out a uniquely textured mythology. Like life and death, it offers no easy or immediate answers.

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Shot in the breathtaking Hunza region of North Pakistan, the show is set in a fictional mountain-land literally named Nowhere, where a rich old man has assembled his family for what he insistently calls his “third and final" wedding. The ceremony is in a few days but nobody has met his bride — who died sixty years ago. His sons, partnerless and motherless half-brothers, watch the old man with disbelief as he carries on. The wedding is on and the feast is being laid.

“You think it’s dementia?" “No. Love."

Why do we believe what we believe? Barzakh explores folk mythology, where people living by the mountains decide to believe in a book and consider it gospel. Some have a harder time believing. Others, who may not understand the book, understand how books can be weaponised. There is a fine line between a community and a cult — and that may simply be a line of prophecy.

It may also be a punchline, the sort of irreverence that swiftly infuriates believers and zealots. “Who came after death?", a precocious nine-year old boy asks his father at the start of the show, just as Barzakh opens up its aspect ratio and its outlandish vistas. The father doesn’t know. “A necrophiliac," says the son, smugly. The father laughs. This is a shockingly age-inappropriate joke — albeit a good one — and it vividly demonstrates writer-director Abbasi’s audacity. This show is like nothing you’ve seen before.

There is imagery everywhere. A mad king has built a glass hall over the graves of vanquished enemies. There are ghosts wandering the halls wearing baby pink, carrying large boulders fastened to their with improbably thin strings. There are tattoos that change shape (to go with people that change colour). There are paintings drawn in realtime depicting secret baggage from the past. There is even a view from the other side of a painting — as if it were a two-way mirror. Who, after all, are we to say that art isn’t looking back at us?

Amid it all stand men who know little — men of all ages who have lost wives and mothers — and muddle cluelessly forward. Are women better at dealing with misery? More resistant, perhaps, less at sea? Barzakh begins with a young woman having too much to say but allowing, instead, her lover to do all the talking because she fears she would never again hear his voice. One woman shares her husband with a dead woman. Another wakes up every morning and reminds herself not to resent the mountains.

Those damn mountains… “In this world you are climbing the mountain," goes one of Barzakh’s many aphoristic lines, “In that world the mountain is climbing you."

Salman Shahid — who Indian audiences may remember as the joke-loving gangster in the Ishqiya films — is tremendous as gruff patriarch Jafar, a man who has constructed his own rituals while building his own kingdom. He appears infirm, often unsound, yet there is a compelling magnetism even to his dismissiveness, his cruelty. You can see why his family hates him, yet can’t leave or ignore him. His sons — played by two excellent actors, both named Fawad Khan — are creatures of conflict, struggling to be nothing like their father while living in his outsize shadow.

Spread over six hourlong episodes, Barzakh is slow and deliberate, with room to ruminate. There is talk about love and bereavement, and insignificant choices made by mortals. Having lost my parents, I found solace in these circuitous, seemingly repetitive, conversations. A young man speaks of losing a partner like losing a limb; you think you can’t do without it but the other limbs get stronger and you soldier on, even though phantom pain persists. He likens losing a parent to a roof caving in. You think you can get past the loss, but when a storm shows up, there is no place to hide. The shade is gone.

The finest performance comes from Sanam Saeed, playing the enigmatic Scheherezade, a girl of uncertain origin popularly called ‘the mountain baby.’ Saeed offers a powerfully calm contrast to the turbulent characters around, and the actress handles exposition — mountains of it — with a cool efficiency, demonstrating how true believers are not easily nonplussed by stories. Some serpents eat their own tails; some tales eat their own serpents. 

Why do we believe what we believe? Because leaps of faith are not a matter of choice. We are who we are, and we hold on to who we love — till we stop believing in them. ’Til faith do us part.

Streaming tip of the week:

Those in the mood for shows about grief and loss — with a profoundly philosophical aftertaste — would do well to check out Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers, streaming now on JioCinema. 2% of the world’s population disappears, and the show is about the ones left behind. 

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