At a time when everything is politicised, be it birth, death, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, the notion of the home land and the reality of displacement, let us pause for moment to acknowledge the fact that Rami Malek, a child raised in America by Egyptian immigrant parents, and with one-eighth Greek heritage ended up playing Freddie Mercury. Mercury, who was born as Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar to Parsi parents of Gujarati descent . Like Rami’s parents, they too were immigrants who left Zanzibar in the mid sixties to come to England. Just goes to show that when it comes to telling human stories, where you come from has no meaning as long as you take the audience some place they have never been to. Bohemian Rhapsody is about that place that we have forgotten to access.
Beyond the poison of divisiveness, that feeling of connection that you feel with every living soul on the planet when you hear a transportive song or glimpse something epiphanic, pure and rare. Like love. And generosity of spirit. The kind, we can’t generate any more in large numbers though hate amasses crowds in a trice. To lynch and to riot.
In an age, where thousands of Yemeni children have died of hunger without being able to evoke a single twinge in our collective conscience, just a few decades back there was Live Aid, a “global jukebox”, that played simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London, and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia and on television screens across the world to raise money for famine-struck Ethiopia. On the same day, Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, Yugoslavia, Austria, Australia and West Germany organised concerts inspired by the initiative. The desire to do something good brought together an estimated audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations. When was the last time the world came together to share such staggering synergy for a cause beyond the narrow constraints of nationalism and political divides? And yes, to share such an immense amount of love. For music. For fellow human-beings in need.
Bohemian Rhapsody is almost as immersive as that camera dip that skims the surface of the 72,000 strong Wembley crowd close to the climax and then takes us to the stage where one of the most memorable live performances by a rock band was about to unfold.
But at a cellular level, beyond the bombast, what the film really celebrates is love. In all its possible manifestations. The love for another human being. For art. For freedom and self expression. For life in all its horror and glory.
Watch the sequence, “Love of my life.” It is a song meant for a woman but the whole stadium, in a distant country fills up with its luminosity.And in the darkness of the theatre, you feel it surge and take you over. And then you know that this love is bigger than just one person. It is the kind of love that transforms people, and bonds even perfect strangers, makes them hold hands, sing and cry together over unnamed things.
The love between two people in the film is not the kind that so many films fake with borrowed Rumi quotes. A recent one even named a heroine after the Sufi poet. No, not that kind of love that has no transcendent power . Or any insight into the primary tenet of Sufiana ishq. The unity of all beings beyond the illusion of division.
No, this is the life-long love a man has for a woman he can never be with. And when she stands in a snatch of sunshine, still and alive like a Botticelli angel, he catches his breath and says, “How beautiful you are!” Because his gaze travels past her body into her soul. And that is why he says about her once,” We believe in each other. That’s enough for me.”
Because, that in the end is what it is all about. Belief in the essential uniqueness and beauty of the other. If you have that, it really doesn’t matter what you don’t. And regardless of what the critics say, the film is not homophobic or apologetic or conflicted about Freddie’s sexuality even though he lived and died in an era when it was essential to protect him from a prying press and the thick air of disapproval around homosexuality and the stigma attached to AIDS.
The only thing that can be truly critiqued is the depiction of Freddie as the one in the band who went solo first when he in fact chose to do so as an afterthought. To however say that his lifestyle and his disease have a crime and punishment tonality in the film is taking a lot away from what the story is really about. The journey of a truly gifted man who lived and created on his own terms and refused to play it safe or to compromise his vision about his life and his art. He never settled for tepid experiences as a musician. His songs had to reach beyond the expected and the ordinary. And when the film plays them back to us, decades after his death, we realise how easily satisfied we are today with the commonplace.
Queen guitarist Brian May once said, “Freddie could make the last person at the back of the furthest stand in a stadium feel that he was connected”. And the film has succeeded in doing that too. It has taken the audience on a voyage within and beyond and in the process, it has connected us to the humanity of an icon whose thoughts about death, freedom and a fretful search for love and meaning were spun into songs that we sang and danced to. Sometimes without really discerning what he was trying to say.
The film has also been accused of using Hollywood tropes about rock stars as fallen angels who are then resurrected. Of mining their supposed isolation and using their personal pain as a cinematic ploy when Freddie was always unapologetic about his choices. The fact though is that even in Freddie’s music, there was always an undertone of dark existential inquiry. He was always straining against normative boundaries. And which artist does not feel like a misfit at some point or the other? Or does not experience isolation? Freddie did write, “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” Even though the song’s almost gnawing desperation is couched in a deceptively joyous arrangement. Why is it hard to imagine that a man even if he was Freddie Mercury, felt at times, unmoored, lost, and lonely enough to long for a lighted window in the darkness to get through an interminable night?
The dichotomy of fame has sliced many lives in half. There was Michael Jackson who said once, “Even at home, I’m lonely. I sit in my room sometimes and cry. It’s so hard to make friends… I sometimes walk around the neighbourhood at night, just hoping to find someone to talk to. But I just end up coming home.” In the 2017 Netflix special, ‘Gaga-Five Foot Two,’ there is the superstar of our time navigating a day full of fame and blinding spotlights, and then coming home to silence and loneliness. The need to have restorative relationships is universal and Malek’s eyes are a window to Freddie’s soul as they seek hope, a sense of home and lasting peace through the progression of a short but explosively eventful life.
That moment when Freddie is sitting by himself in a country cottage, tinkering with a piano and the keynotes of a song that is both a pean to love and a death wish and wells up with tears and pain, says everything there is to know about those who create art of lasting beauty. That brilliant blaze of light comes at a price.
As Freddie wrote once,
“I’ve taken my bows. And my curtain calls.
You brought me fame and fortune, and everything that goes with it, I thank you all.
But it’s been no bed of roses, No pleasure cruise.”
How could it have been for someone so unique, and marked so obviously for great joy and suffering?
Rami Malek possibly understood right at the onset that he did not just have to inhabit Freddie’s physicality. That he would have to dig deeper and so he does. He expresses with heart-breaking efficacy, Freddie’s wounded vulnerability and also his undiminished defiance of not just his disease but his demons. Rami, with that funny thing he does with the overbite Freddie was always so conscious of, his all-seeing gaze and his intuitive channelling of a majestic spirit roots us in a story that in the end is about all of us. We too are the champions of our stories, though unsung and in Freddie, we see bits of ourselves, just as he saw in us, bits of himself.
And despite the inaccuracies in the narrative, that is what the audience has taken back with them. A bit of the magic that was Freddie Mercury. And the cadence that his music shared with Rumi’s poetry. That no matter who we are, and where we come from, there is more out there and in here that binds us than divides us. And that is why as of now, Bohemian Rhapsody is the highest-grossing musical biopic of all-time. Worldwide.
Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.