Interview: Zinda Bhaag is a tribute to Lahori films of the '70s and '80s

The Pakistani film Zinda Bhaag is making waves, especially after it became Pakistan's first entry to the Oscars in over 50 years. Excerpts from a conversation with the director duo, Meenu Gaur and Farjad Nabi.

The Zinda Bhaag team is a remarkable union of Indian and Pakistani talent, from the directors to the technical crew. Did that ever create issues: logistical or political or personal?

Farjad: Far from it, one was hard-pressed to tell the Indian crew apart from the Pakistani one. The ‘Indians’ were hard-core Lahoris by the time they left. The logistical issues of visas etc. were always there, but when are they not? And if there is anything we take real pride in then it's this: that our 200-odd Pakistani cast and crew were all working on their first feature side-by-side with four committed, passionate filmmakers from across the border. And look at how far we got together!

Meenu: No Bollywood film is complete without a song by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Shafqat Amanat Ali or Atif Aslam. Most Pakistani films like Bol or Ishq-e-Khuda also do post-production work in India. So collaboration per se isn't unique to Zinda Bhaag.

Is there such a thing as Pakistani cinema, and where does Zinda Bhaag locate itself within that field? How does it feel to represent Pakistan on an international stage?

Farjad: It's slippery terrain if you try and define it too precisely. The new films coming out of Pakistan are very varied in terms of content and that is how it should be.

Meenu: We didn't set out to make a film that would represent Pakistan on an international stage. We really struggled to get prints made so as to take the film into small-town cinemas, in Sargodha, Gujranwala, Faislabad, Multan, etc, because we thought of the story as very local. But screenings abroad have made us realize how universal this story really is. A Bulgarian lady in Canada told our producer that “these boys that you showed in your film, these are the kind of boys I went to school with”!

How and why did you zero in on illegal immigration and gambling as themes?

Farjad: We had heard some real-life stories from very close friends and relatives. These stories form part of Lahori street-lore, and I believe across South Asia. We just had to put our ears to the ground and listen. We found that this urgency to do what is called the ‘dunky’ in Lahori lingo (the illegal route to Europe) is tied up with ideas of masculine honour, success, tradition. It’s also about a simple belief in what our ’70s’ films embodied so well – the system as the enemy, the system that never allows us to take ‘legitimate’ routes to success. As for gambling, it is as much part of the daily lives of young men as reading the newspaper.

Meenu: The seed of the idea was there for some time. The Let's Talk Men project [under which three other films have been made on South Asian masculinities] gave it a context and a focus in our research phase. Eventually we wanted to tell a tale of lives caught between a sense of entitlement and a foretold failure.

It's a serious subject. But the form you've chosen is visually playful, often boisterously funny. What were your sources of inspiration?

Meenu: Well, you have to be Lahori or know the culture of what is called the 'juggat' (repartee) in Lahore to get that aspect completely. It's the Lahori style of conversation.

Farjad: Our inspiration was the typical Lahori attitude which cannot resist a one-liner in the most dire of moments. In terms of form, it's a tribute to the now-collapsed Lahori film industry. We love the films of the '70s and '80s: the time Lollywood was at its peak.

Meenu: So we used flashbacks, voices in the head, a very warm colour tone, the concept of the 'shareef badmaash' through the character of Puhlwan – these are all elements from a certain era of Lollywood. Similarly for the music. We wanted situational songs, like in older films, where they were a space for expressing that which cannot be expressed in dialogue, that which needs a poetic expression. Situations of romance, suffering, existential angst, a spiritual or moral dilemma, desires, fantasy, aspirations, of mocking the rich and powerful... So Zinda Bhaag uses film songs in their most traditional form. Bagga, our music director, took this a step further and created the music through live instruments, to evoke film music from a bygone era. So all these really amazing veteran violin players, saxophone players, cello players and brass bands came together for our music. This was probably the funnest bit of making this film.

Did you always plan on having songs?

Farjad: Yes. It was a deliberate decision on our part. It was not a compulsion. There is a tendency amongst the cultural elite to have a knee-jerk rejection to this South Asian film form and view it as inferior to Hollywood or European film form. I also think it masks a class bias of low culture vs high culture – suggesting that films with songs provide mindless entertainment for the ‘masses’ as opposed to the more ‘mindful’ art cinema of the educated ‘gentry/elite’. Whether a film has songs or doesn't is a lazy way to judge the impact or truthfulness of its content. Filmmakers should feel free to choose a form that feels right for their story-telling. Our traditional stories have always been told through songs. Heer Ranjha, Sassi Punnu, this is all theatre in verse.

Meenu: We also wanted to invert the Punjabi hero of the '90s era Lollywood film- always blood-thirsty, avenging and one who absolutely never sang or danced. So not only is our hero one who is grappling with failure and dishonour, unlike the '90s Punjabi hero, but also one who can dance with abandon.

Why did you decide to use non-professionals for the central roles – the three boys, Khaldi, Taambi and Chitta? And why not for Puhlvan?

Meenu: We knew we wanted audiences to relate to the boys intimately, like they would to their nephews, cousins, friends. In the auditions we were looking for certain personalities rather than actors as such. However, Puhlvan was a character who was essentially a story-teller who had to hold the audience's attention. We knew it had to be an accomplished actor who could carry off that.

Farjad: So as soon as the words 'accomplished actor' were used, Naseer saab's name was sure to follow.

Is Puhlwan modelled on a real person? What about Rubina?

Farjad: Yes, on many real characters. His look with red henna hair symbolizes a particular kind of older man in Lahore. In the old-style concept of 'Puhlvani', a euphemism for using force, the violence was never overt. The philosophy goes that one's power must be like the wind: always felt, never seen.

Meenu: Rubina is supposed to be a 'cheetee' (leopardess) in Lahori lingo. She is ambitious, straight talking and hard-working. The character is culled from many women we met while researching in local beauty parlours.

You've both made documentary films earlier. What made you take the plunge into fiction? How would you compare your past experience to making non-fiction?

Farjad: Our documentaries occupy the liminal space between non-fiction and fiction. Both stylistically and content wise we were both always more comfortable mixing the two worlds.

Meenu: There is something similar about documentary film making and doing a PhD. There are many lessons from both which are very useful in fiction film-making. The nice thing about doing fiction features is that its so collaborative and therefore not such a lonely process as doing a doctorate.

How did your script evolve? I believe you didn't have the ending in mind when you began, and it wasn't all written in Punjabi to begin with...

Meenu: It was the first time we were writing a film script. [Bombay-based screenwriter] Urmi Juvekar, who was a lovely teacher, helped us straighten out a lot of it. We used to write many of the scenes in Urdu or English before converting to Punjabi. Many of the dialogues also came through improvisations.

The film has got great press in Pakistan. Are you planning an Indian release? 

Farjad: The film is in its second week in theatres at the moment; last night we went to a cinema and it was packed. That too, in Karachi, which is not a Punjabi-speaking audience. Pakistani responses on social media have been quite overwhelming. The ZB team couldn't have asked for more.

Meenu: Yes, we are planning an Indian release. We think this is a story which would be as easy to relate to in an Indian context, without any of it being lost (in translation). 

What next?

Meenu: We are writing two other scripts. But before that we have two documentaries to complete.

[An edited excerpt from this interview was published on Firstpost, here. And my review of Zinda Bhaag is here.]

Film Review: Zinda Bhaag

My review of Pakistan's Oscar-hopeful:

“Jis Lahore nai dekhya woh jamyai nai,” goes the famous title line from the Asghar Wajahat play – whoever hasn’t seen Lahore hasn’t been born yet. But what of those who see Lahore every day, but can only dream of other places? 

Meenu Gaur and Farjad Nabi’s debut feature, Zinda Bhaag, centres round three such young men, Khaldi (Khurram Patras), Taambi (Zohib) and Chitta (Salman Ahmed Khan), friends from Lahore’s lower middle class ‘c’lonies’. One works in a cable internet company, another in the kitchen of a club. But their hearts aren’t in it. All their energies are focused on somehow going abroad. In the meanwhile, they get hilariously drunk, bemoan betrayals by girls, and keep an eye out for free food – even if it’s mutton korma at a funeral. That’s when they aren’t offering obeisance at the court of Pehlvaan — Naseeruddin Shah as the mehndi-haired local don, with a nazar as sharp as his perfectly-threaded eyebrows. 

It is Pehlvaan’s rhetorical question with which the film opens: why does everyone (including the young trio of Zinda Bhaag) want to leave a sona sheher like Lahore, when it has everything life has to offer? And it is Pehlvaan’s stories, delivered in resonant, guttural Punjabi, that create the mythical matrix of hope and tragedy within which that question echoes. 

The first story Pehlvaan tells is at the funeral of his old friend Booba, whose body has just returned to Lahore, some forty years after Booba left the city by doing a 'dunky', an illegal border crossing into Europe. That imagined Technicolour flashback is the first sign of the film’s sense of fun. When Booba and his illegal companions are apprehended by Turkish officials, the sprightly young Lahori lets loose all the English words he’s garnered over the years. Dressed in a flashy three piece suit (which, Pehlvaan tells us, cost Booba a ton of money), Booba channels a 1980s Amitabh Bachchan and succeeds in dazzling the Turks. He walks out of the frame and into France, where Pehlvaan’s mythic retelling has him establish a glitzy, tacky restaurant with the brilliant name of La Booba. 

Pehlvaan’s qissas, though playfully shot as visual departures from the central narrative, don’t so much punctuate the film as create its moral universe. The tales are about great gamblers he once knew: Younus Powderi, who was in too much of a hurry to make a fortune and is now a drug addict, or Billa Kashmiri, who was unjust to his clerk and ended up a beggar. Our nodding young protagonists lap up Pehlvaan’s fund of unsolicited authoritative advice, stepping all too eagerly into a world filled with steep climbs and even steeper falls. 

Gambling is at the core of this worldview: there are horse races, cricket betting, and all kinds of card games. But the biggest gamble is the dunky. The power and dangers of risk-taking are served up with a side of masculinist philosophy. “Paisa de kismat saaliyan hain beta. Asal cheez hai sabar,” declares Pehlvaan in a largely untranslatable South Asian joke that valorises patience. “If you marry patience, the other two come free.” 

By tracing the lives of the three young men, Gaur and Nabi’s script taps into a rich vein of desperate imaginings, a dream-life in which the vision of Europe or a winning racehorse provides an appealing alternative to the backbreaking labour and terribly low odds of actually pulling oneself out of poverty by more regular means. 

In contrast to the boys, each of whom gets sucked into a descending spiral of impossible chances, the film presents us with the sparkly, ever-optimistic Rubina (Amna Ilyas). She roams the city with her home-made bars of ‘Facelook’ soap in the hope of placing them in some mall. Her dreams aren’t smaller, the film seems to say, but she’s working hard to fulfil them rather than waiting for them to just come true. 

Originally commissioned as part of a series of films on masculinities, the Let’s Talk Men project, Zinda Bhaag does seem to offer up a too-easy contrast here, but to its credit, it never stoops to lecturing its audience. Khaldi’s dipping self-esteem and increasing insecurity are etched acutely, especially as they begin to cut away at his relationship with Rubina, but we thankfully never hear Rubina turn around and offer a feminist lecture. 

The three young men’s roles are played by non-actors. They’re locals of the Lahori neighbourhoods in which the filmmakers set their story. Though they’re certainly not very good actors, their rawness grows on you. But other characters and situations — Khaldi’s mother trying to marry his sister off to a terminally ill man for money, or Taambi’s showdown with his father — retain an unsatisfactory, jerky feel that stops them from being as moving as they could be. 

Despite an interesting script and a boisterous sense of fun, Zinda Bhaag remains an uneven ride. Most glaring are the songs. The über-bright dream sequence song, or even the situationally apt Rahat Fateh Ali Khan number, distract from the narrative rather than aiding its flow. They’re clearly meant to make this whacky film more mainstream, thus giving it a greater chance of reaching out to the audience whose lives it addresses. But while the music might be robust enough to work as an independent album, the song picturisations don’t match up. 

Zinda Bhaag is by no means a perfect film, but it takes risks and is immensely watchable. It’s a film about serious things that refuses to take itself too seriously. That deserves applause.

Published in Firstpost.