Hansal Mehta – Filmmaker | Director | Writer | Official Website

I’m overwhelmed. So maybe in this state I’m overstating. But I think I have just watched the best Partition film ever made.

I couldn’t sleep after it. I sat with the lights off for a long time and then I got up and started writing this, badly, and I’m still not sure I’ve calmed down enough to be trusted.

Hollywood makes its Holocaust films count. Every one of them. They mount them, they fund them, they hand them awards, and they keep doing it decade after decade until the memory is safe. We never did that. A million people died in 1947. Fifteen million were pushed out of their homes. Almost eighty years later I can name our films about it on my fingers. Garm Hava. Tamas. Pinjar. Earth. Khamosh Pani. Train to Pakistan. That’s not a canon. That’s what’s left after eighty years of looking away.

We escape from our realities. The audience doesn’t get to. They carry it in their surnames. They carry it in the way a grandmother says the name of a town that isn’t hers anymore.

Main Vaapas Aaunga is Imtiaz’s best film.

I have always envied him. Not for his brilliance. Because he is so fucking good looking, or maybe just attractive in all his messiness, which is worse. His films kept falling in love with the same discovery. Somebody gets on a train, comes loose from the life they were handed, finds themselves. I enjoyed them. I loved the music. And I sat there envying an audience that kept rewarding a man for repeating himself.

This one destroyed me.

Mr. Grewal is ninety-five and dying and his memory has come apart. His body is in India. His mind is in Sargodha. Seventy-eight years here have been wiped and the first seventeen have survived. Everyone around his bed hears nonsense and waits for him to go. Only the grandson sits down and listens. That’s all he does. He listens to a dying man’s broken sentences like they’re directions to somewhere.

I don’t know how to write about what Naseerbhai does here. He isn’t playing an old man. He’s playing a man watching himself leave. Vedang carries 1947 and doesn’t once try to imitate him. The beautiful Sharvari is the heart of it. Rajat, Suri, Manish, Vinodji, Dolly and every one of you — take the applause.

And it flows like a river. A river that runs between countries, between generations, between hearts. It says what hatred and religion can’t. It isn’t what limited intellect calls mainstream and yet it sits close to everyone who watches it. It defies formula. It defies logic. And it tears you apart.

ARR, you are the heartbeat. The heart-lung machine for a weak heart, and here the tonic for one that is still beating. You and Irshad wrote for a man who can’t hold a thought, and the songs hold it for him. Your music goes beyond music. Like the film goes beyond cinema. Like poetry goes beyond words. Like love conquers all.

This film opened slow. The numbers were celebrated by all who claim to care for the ‘industry’.’Then week two was bigger, and week three was bigger still, and it went past the lifetime worldwide number of Jab We Met. A Partition film. A dying man. Dementia. Two timelines. No massy alibi. Nobody was tricked into the theatre. 

So stop blaming the audience. This film is what happens when someone is allowed to feel too much on screen and nobody stops him.

What a triumph, Imtiaz. The best film I have seen this year. One for the generations.

Kudos.