Zinda Bhaag – Good but not Good Enough!

What con­sti­tutes a good movie? In my opin­ion it sim­ply includes imagery, char­ac­ters, sit­u­a­tions, con­flicts and thoughts, all woven into the basic fab­ric of the art of movie mak­ing. Please note that among all these ele­ments I do not men­tion any kind of moral agen­da a film should prop­a­gate to its view­ers. To me if moral agen­da is not the ter­tiary then only a sec­ondary ele­ment of a movie which may or may not com­ple­ment the movie itself.

In the case of Zin­da Bhaag the moral agen­da it offers to its view­ers does not com­ple­ment the movie as a whole; in fact it ruins a large part because it cre­ates a split in the sto­ry. Part of the sto­ry cov­ers the imagery and diver­si­ty; Laho­ris, Lahore itself and as a city in terms of the exten­sion of the exu­ber­ant lives of its peo­ple. And the oth­er part want­ed to make this movie worth­while for its view­ers by por­tray­ing moral issues of the peo­ple who bad­ly want to emi­grate their bod­ies and souls out of Pak­istan. It gets even worse when the movie takes a detour and start explor­ing the evils of gam­bling as well.

This kind of cre­ative split hap­pens and will keep hap­pen­ing for anoth­er few years in this recent wave of Pak­istani cin­e­ma, not because we don’t have good artists, sto­ry­tellers and direc­tors but because we as a soci­ety are not yet ready to take movies as a pure form of art. So, if our artists don’t have any spe­cif­ic moral agen­da coher­ent with their artis­tic expres­sion, they’ll try to push its way in it, sim­ply to pro­vide ser­vice­able and wel­fare grounds for the social con­sump­tion of their art. For me, how­ev­er, movies are not great because they give good moral mes­sages, movies are great because they make peo­ple hap­py or sad and they train their viewer’s visu­al and lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence, their emo­tions and feel­ings. And essen­tial­ly movies (just like any oth­er artis­tic expres­sion) human­ize dif­fer­ent liv­ing con­di­tions and its inter­ac­tion with the soci­ety and nature and pro­vide an oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­pre­hend a part of this mad and messy world.

Zin­da Bhaag falls short of great­ness in many respects; I’ll high­light a cou­ple of them. First of all Naseerud­din Shah’s char­ac­ter and place in the film was very dis­ap­point­ing. But still his amaz­ing act­ing keeps the char­ac­ter inter­est­ing. For rea­sons unknown his char­ac­ter, called Pehal­van was cre­at­ed out of the bound­ary line of the main sto­ry. Like a set pat­tern his char­ac­ter remains on the clock through­out the film. Some­body fig­ured out a for­mu­la to uti­lize his act­ing tal­ents i.e. when­ev­er the direc­tor thinks there’s a need for the screen pres­ence of Naseer Sahib they put some tid­bits from the past of Pehal­vaan. Although these flash­backs were bit inter­est­ing but very soon this whole exer­cise becomes redun­dant.

Sec­ond­ly, the sub­ject of the film was unable to cre­ate a prop­er dra­ma or con­flict through­out the film. The con­flict was there but just like many oth­er things it played out most­ly in the back­ground. The cli­max was abrupt and announced in the Sufi num­ber of Rahet Fateh Ali Khan as if it could hold all the emo­tion­al imbal­ance the cli­max has tried to cre­ate. All these things basi­cal­ly relate with how clear the direc­tor and script writer are about their own film before mak­ing the film. But a lot of it is under­stand­able when you read about the chal­leng­ing con­di­tion this film has been made in. There is a long way ahead for Pak­istani film indus­try and Zin­da Bhaag actu­al­ly shows that we have an amaz­ing poten­tial to make mem­o­rable films.