‘Barzakh’ series review: Fawad Khan grounds a bewitching, overblown saga

British-Pakistani director Asim Abbasi’s ‘Barzakh’ is an achingly, unabashedly artful series starring Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed star as siblings

“The past is not dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. Everything in Barzakh — images, ideas, sounds — responds to that famously Faulknerian sentiment. The title refers to a kind of limbo, an earthly purgatory, where the dead move amidst the living. The six-part series has been shot in the ravishing Hunza Valley, in Northern Pakistan, and is drenched in a despairing, deciduous beauty. Characters converse in pseudo-spiritualistic fragments and heartsick hokum (and also do shrooms). Mountains, as usual, hold the key to everything. Watching the series, I found myself nervously wondering if, across the border, the director Imtiaz Ali was paying attention. What if he feels a little bested, and takes it up as a challenge?

Late in life, Jafar (Salman Shahid), a reclusive resort owner sinking into dementia, has decided to marry again. It’s his third and final one, he pledges. Jafar’s estranged sons, Shehryar (Fawad A Khan) and Saifullah (Fawad M Khan) have been summoned, while a third child, Scheherazade (Sanam Saeed) — a daughter of uncertain origin — is at his beck and call. Jafar skulks in his vast wood-panelled resort called ‘Mahtab Mahal’, named for his first and true love. It’s Mahtab (Anika Zulfikar), he says, who he intends to marry. Also – get this — she is a ghost.

The flashbacks that play at the beginning and end of each episode are a useful conceit in British-Pakistani director Asim Abbasi’s series. Shot in a boxed-in aspect ratio, they give us fragments from the characters’ pasts, some tender, some tragic, and fill out the larger lore of the story. Younger actors take some of these roles; as such, by the time past and present have been melded together — as was always bound to happen — we feel comfortably moored in their conflicts and traumas. It lends the slow-moving series the sheen of an epic: without Khushhal Khan as the younger Jafar, for instance, sallying forth into the world to build his fortune, romantically resting his head on a bus window, would we have cared much for the ranting patriarch in the present day, dreaming of lunar eclipses and a wedding in the hills?

I had enjoyed the sass and irreverent humour of Abbasi’s previous Pakistan-set series, the crime thriller Chudails (also on ZEE5). Thematically, though, Barzakh is closer to his 2018 debut feature Cake, about two sisters who assemble, and unravel, after a distress call. Here, both of Jafar’s grown-up boys arrive with baggage: Shehryar is a widower and a single father; the partnerless Saifullah has a touch of reduced affect display. Abbasi is on song when exploring his favoured themes of guilt and generational trauma. The heavier stuff — allegories about female oppression, religious fanaticism and the erasure of ethnic communities — mostly land with a thud.

This is an achingly, unabashedly artful series. Abbasi and cinematographer Mo Azmi lose themselves in lush mountainscapes dotted with trees: poplars, apricots. Everything appears ripe with metaphor: leaves, pigeons, palm marks, occult moon signs scrawled on a shaman’s wall. The boulders of rocks that the ghosts bear on their backs resemble, from an angle, fairy wings. A circular door jamb echoes the Ouroboros tattooed on a character's forearm. The characters appear trapped in an uncanny valley of longing and death. Jafar resides in a literal haunted house, though the lives of the ordinary village folk feel just as bewitched (they seem agreed on what “the womb of the universe” denotes).

Four episodes in, the series hits a terrible false note — a psychedelic freak-out that pops the mood of sustained mysticism Abbasi had so carefully conjured. It deflates, momentarily, into a bad variety show, away from wildness and surrealism and into the realm of stagey performance art. As striking as some of the imagery in Barzakh is, it lacks the fragmentary, authentically dreamlike quality of something like Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Jonaki. Not that Abbasi is out to woo art film circles alone; his show has been marketed as a piece of episodic TV, aimed at fans of Zindagi Gulzar Hai and other soap opera hits from the subcontinent.

Ever since he was unceremoniously exiled from our screens, Indian audiences have long craved the sight of Fawad A Khan. As Shehryar, the actor pairs his wintry handsomeness with a comic cynicism that proves critical: “Are you always this high?”, he asks Scheherazade after one of her (many) poetic disquisitions. His namesake, Fawad M Khan, who plays Saifulla, is equally moving over a few effective scenes, while Shahid — who Hindi film fans would recall from Kabul Express and the two Ishqiya films — is enjoyably crotchety and vain in a flamboyant part. Each time doddering old Jafar would cock an eyebrow and bark a mellifluous bark, I was reminded of the great Indian actor Pran, who, like Shahid, was also born in Pre-Independence Lahore. Artists, like spirits, are borderless beings.