Pakistani director Asim Abbasi’s series, featuring Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed, is a revealing portrait of intergenerational masculinity that has been disallowed to love, and the tragedy of its cyclicity
All storytellers tell stories but good storytellers keep telling the same story. The framework might differ, the design varies, but the skeletons are the same. The reasons are plenty, and inexplicable. Who is to say why Steven Spielberg’s filmography stings with the image of dysfunctional parenthood? Why do Christopher Nolan’s films travel through space and time only to circle back to loss? Why do Jhumpa Lahiri’s books have an immigrant protagonist heaving with the burden of home? Equally puzzling — and evident — is Pakistani director Asim Abbasi’s preoccupation with decaying families and women as its victims, and survivors.
In his 2018 directorial feature debut, Cake, the theme was obvious. Based in Karachi and set in a household of two estranged sisters who are compelled to reunite due to their father’s ill-health, the film milked the resentment of caregiving to outline the collective bitterness brewing in a family. He followed this up with Churails (2020), a long-form vigilante show headlined by women that culminated as a far more nuanced outing than its strident premise allowed.
Family was not at the forefront but its disruption is what egged on the wheels of the enterprise. Barzakh, his third work that is currently streaming on Zee5, is a bit of both. It leans heavily on Cake where a malfunctional domestic set-up leaks into everything and everyone, and also carries the full-force of Churails’ female rage where the mistreatment of women by men do not go unpunished.
But Barzakh is also unlike anything, not just in Abbasi’s career but in the South Asian streaming space where every pore is clogged with shows that unfold as reiterations of each other. The six-episode Pakistani series is a riveting example of invention that bursts at the seams with ambition. Barzakh crafts its own language and commits to a worldbuilding that is filled with rapture and ambition. The word ‘ambition’ often comes up while thinking about Abbasi’s new work as, with all its dense allegories and resistance to meaning, it stands out as an instance of genuine creation away from the trappings of market trends. Based solely on that, it is a marvel that something like Barzakh exists.
Barzakh crafts its own language and commits to a worldbuilding that is filled with rapture and ambition
An Impossible Love
The premise is straight out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel. An old patriarch sends out invitations to his two estranged sons, Saifullah and Shahryār (both actors are called Fawad Khan, and both are excellent), one from each marriage, for his third and final wedding to his “one and true love”. Except, she is dead or, well, missing. Many years ago, when the cantankerous Jafar Khanzada (Salman Shahid in an ostentatious turn) was a young man, he had fallen in love with a girl called Mahtab (Anika Zulfikar).
They had pledged to be together till the big city beckoned Jafar and he left with the promise to return. By the time he did, Mahtab was nowhere to be found; all his life and through two failed marriages, Jafar continued loving her in his heart (in one flashback scene, one of his wives says, “who will share you with a dead girl like I did?”). Now, with death staring in the face, he wants to marry the woman who is not alive.
Barzakh, which denotes the limbo state between death and resurrection, visibly draws from literary works apart from Márquez. There are elements of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Jafar’s journey from naiveté (his short-lived relationship with Mahtab) to corruption (as a construction tycoon, he displaced more people than housing them) to his longing for higher innocence in the form of a union with Mahtab — a reminder of his pious past.
There is a strong allusion to Dante’s Purgatory as the characters, all sinners, face the prospect of a journey and the chance for redemption; there is a bit of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the way Abbasi denotes the haunting attribute of guilt (a character, culpable for killing someone, keeps wiping his hands). There is Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in the show’s literal messaging of children coming through parents and not from them.
Beneath the layers of magic realism, the series reveals to be a love story with towering stakes.
The central plot of impossible love shares its genesis with Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence which defamiliarizes the familiar love story of Mughal emperor Akbar and his Rajput wife, Jodha Bai by rendering her as a figment of his imagination, and the names of the characters — Scheherazade, Shahryār and Jafar — are drawn from One Thousand and One Nights. These influences are further amplified by designing the series itself in the form of a book, with each episode bookended by a chapter.
A High-Stake Love Story
Abbasi uses these to embellish his story as well as craft a distinct world — he terms it the Land of Nowhere — where reality and magic coexist and so do the dead, the living and the undead. It is a land so serene (the stunning Hunza Valley in the Gilgit-Baltistan region forms the backdrop and cinematographer Mo Azmi frames with a keen eye) that the mountains appear to be supporting the sky. Ghosts here are fallen angels with stones weighing on their back and young women, coerced by patriarchal diktats, become fairies on the other sides of the peak.
They reside away from our gaze, in the land of the unseen, where Mahtab lives and where Jafar wishes to reunite with her on the occasion of the autumnal equinox. Except, their union threatens to destroy everything, including Mahtab Mahal, the hotel which Jafar built and lives in with a caretaker (the evocative Sanam Saeed — the narrator and guide, bearing a name that is both a pointer and a puzzle), and the remains of the elders on which it has been built. Their marriage then is as improbable as it is contentious, provoking the other inhabitants of the land, mainly Jafar’s brother Jabbar, to protest.
Beneath the layers of magic realism, the series reveals to be a love story with towering stakes. The tale is as old as time: two lovers, parted by circumstances, are fighting to be together even as the rest stand up in arms. Abbasi teases love as scaffolding only to build a revealing portrait of intergenerational masculinity that has been disallowed to love. The characters offer a hint. The men in the show are paper cuts of human beings who are colder than ghosts — brittle and irritable.
They are phantom-like figures, breathing but hardly alive. The filmmaker underlines their unlived status through colours (the fairies above are draped in red, the ghosts below appear in pink while the humans are ashen even under light), words (when a widower is consoled with a hug, he retorts, “everyone wants a piece of me today”) and image-making. They are framed extensively against mirrors but none is incapable of self-reflection.
The Vocabulary of Grief
In that sense, Barzakh, designed as an origin story of toxic masculinity, can be read as a tragedy of its cyclicity. Born to a father who killed himself over poverty, Jafar only accumulated wealth and shouldered no paternal or spousal responsibilities. His intolerance to weakness and demand for obedience ensured that the only person he listens to is his caretaker who treats him with unquestionable reverence (she refers to him as ‘aaqa,’ meaning god). That Saifullah and Shahryār grew up without their father’s care had damning consequences.
Saifullah is tellingly single but it is Shahryār, father to a nine-year-old (Syed Arham), who imbibed most of Jafar’s causticity despite being the most critical. As a husband he was as neglectful and as a father, as dishonest. It is a jarring premise with Abbasi, forever with a knack for mining fragility in families, penciling the curse of inheritance.
The show is most effective when pondering over these interpersonal ties. Several moments shared between the father and the sons, like Saifullah awkwardly dancing to a (once banned) love song in the hope of catching the old man’s attention or conversations between Jafar and Shahryār erupting into fights with both jabbing verbal daggers at each other are more memorable than many full-length shows. But Barzakh is also excessive, verbose and chaotic. There is an overwrought imaginative mind at play which makes the abundance of details (a crucial idea about human beings never really dying is gratingly reiterated) and the theatricality of some scenes look like indulgence.
Barzakh provides no answer because it is both an exposition and introspection; it is both heaven and hell, death and resurrection.
In the larger scheme of things, however, the mysticism makes sense because of how personal Barzakh feels. In interviews, Abbasi shared that he wrote the show after his father’s death and so much of the outing can be distilled to a son (one can read the acrid Shahryār as a stand-in of Abbasi himself) confronting his father only to understand him, forgive and be forgiven. This desperation to unpack gives way to a showy shroom subplot — magnificently lit up by Azmi — in episode four which divulges nothing except for a child’s desire to give their father another chance for confession. A lot works when one looks at the series as a grieving exercise, grasping for a coherent language like grief itself.
The Inheritance of Loss
The key, it seems, is to articulate the right questions and not so much as find answers to them; the intent is to acknowledge an unyielding paternal figure as a flesh and blood person who was once young and capable of love. Through the characters of the sons (one incapable of accepting love and the other unable of giving), Abbasi raises self-serving existential queries: Are men fundamentally incapable of loving? How long does the inheritance of loss last? Do sons learn from their fathers or do fathers act out because of their sons? (Will he repeat the cycle?)
In One Thousand and One Nights, Shahryār is the Persian king who, when betrayed by his wife, took a new maiden everyday only to kill her; Jafar is the vizier who carried out the task for him. In Barzakh, Jafar and Shahryār are related by blood, begging the question: Did Shahryār continue killing women because Jafar continued executing them? Or did Jafar continue executing because Shahryār kept killing? Are all men related by their contempt for women? (Will he repeat the cycle?)
Barzakh provides no answer because it is both an exposition and introspection; it is both heaven and hell, death and resurrection. It is all, and none. But the one thing Abbasi lends clarity to is the pivotal role women play in disrupting patterns and transforming spaces. In a way, he is still telling the same story, but this time around, he scoops women out of the narrative to reiterate its dystopian nature. But not all were absent. There remains Scheherazade, the storyteller and redeemer, quenching our curiosity by asserting the presence of an afterlife where human beings transition to but do not perish. Through her, Barzakh asks: If allowed to love, will we live differently? If allowed to live, will we die differently?
