Review: Sarmad Khoosat's 'Zindagi Tamasha' leaves you with an unexplained sense of agony

Sometimes one wonders why do conservative societies like ours don’t have the same gripe with violence as they do with an overt expression of love. You can kill for leisure and get away with it, you can kill for ideology and be embraced for it but getting caught in an act of love or something truly passionate may trigger some of our worst primordial insecurities.

Right and wrong, sense and nonsense, no longer matter when the collective has already decided to ostracize and excommunicate an individual for standing out. Repentance is then offered as the only way back and that too not from the divine or state, but from those who feel offended by you and your expression of leisure.

Times change, new characters come and go and this vicious cycle of cultural vulgarity gets fueled again and again, if not by supreme moral authorities, then a bunch of youngsters eager to be on the right side of history. Pinpoint, call out, expel, and repeat!

Famous playwright Asghar Nadeem Syed once said that the reason why our humour hasn’t grown beyond mocking individual identities and particularly the marginalised such as the transgender and people of short stature is that our collective sense of ‘entertainment’ hasn’t grown beyond that of a circus audience. Unless someone is mocked, hurt and retorted for existing the way they exist, the greater part of our whole doesn’t find their catharsis. And that’s why we are stuck in ‘the caveman’s world’ and heading towards even more vile times.

Zindagi Tamasha (ZT) seems like an exploration of what Syed said almost five years ago, around the time when the script must have been put to paper, but the Sarmad Khoosat directorial stirred a lot more of our casual filth with its theme, subject matter and now, even the timing of its digital release. ZT is about a Rahat Khwaja ( Arif Hasan) a Naatkhwan, a dedicated servant of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), who tends to his bedridden wife Farkhunda (Samiya Mumtaz) before the backdrop of a Masjid-e-Nabwai calendar.

His daughter Sadaf (Eman Suleman) works for a TV channel where she produces one of your typical morning shows. She is silently proud of his father, until one day, while looking for a viral video to fill in for a missing guest on her show, she sees her father thumping his chest to a Lollywood classic and YouTube going wild over his moves.

That single act of nonchalant celebration among friends sets Rahat down a path to slow yet certain ostracization. From being a casual target for jokes and slights, to being seen as something he loathes - the dregs of society gathering in the dark for forbidden entertainment - he finds himself no longer commanding the adulation and respect he once had. Pushed to the fringe, he is viewed by his neighbours as somehow much worse than those they hold no respect for - because of his perceived fall from grace.

Caught between the two worlds, a stranger exiled to the fringe, Rahat cuts a painfully lonely figure, even as he tries to make light of his depression by clinging to his jovial optimism. The social, however, is not the worst aspect of Rahat's tragedy. It is the estrangement that grows with his daughter that cuts the deepest, for one wonders he could be fine as long as he had those he loves with him.

In handling Rahat's fall, ZT is masterfully subtle. The subject matter invites the temptation to sensationalise. Despite the controversy that doomed the film from release, ZT is not quite a controversial film, at least in the cut that has been put up on YouTube. The ordinariness of Rahat's plight, and the ordinariness of the responses he encounters, paradoxically enhance the scale of the tragedy.

We can almost see this film happen in real life. The film does not build up to any extravagant crescendo - there's no violence of the physical sort, nor any attempt at self-harm. Rahat continues down a road that, as it unfurls before him, simply becomes an impossible place to return from.

And yet, it is perhaps the bleakest film to come out of Pakistan. The bleakness mirrored both by the film's real-life fate and at the timing of its release for free, by the mood prevalent in our nation. It's easy to find an uncomfortable parallel in Rahat for most of us Pakistanis. We too remain naively optimistic, even as little by little, reasons to be hopeful transmute into impossible dreams.

The wider reaction to ZT since it became available on YouTube has been rather harsh and confusing. Given the controversy, the movie perhaps became such a mythical entity that viewers, when they finally watched it, wondered what the fuss was about. Pakistani audiences also generally expect some measure of hope and vindication from stories, and ZT offers none.

But since the bleak world of ZT is not in your face with its oppression, it may leave most with an unexplained sense of agony. Seen for what it is, ZT is a film done right as far as Pakistani cinema is concerned.

Verdict: Treat Zindagi Tamasha like just another film and not some hyped-up mythical entity to find it subtly convincing.

3.5 / 5