In the last scene of Highway, Alia Bhatt’s Veera stands cradling Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her arms watching over two undamaged children playing in the valley stretched before her. She has run with the wolves and come home. It has been a long journey with a lot of motifs that we recognise by now from Imtiaz Ali’s cinema like the India, he always makes us rediscover. Captured in its ruggedness, raw energy and healing purity by Anil Mehta. Those of us who have grown up on long bus journeys to the mountains during summer holidays will watch with nostalgia, the slate roofed houses, the sloping valleys with grazing sheep and quaint shops with Kullu jackets.
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Then there are his signature bridges spanning between one reality and another. And a road trip taking protagonists from the familiar to the unknown. On a journey that sometimes starts with an accident. Sometimes with a whim. Mostly without a plan as Randeep Hooda’s Mahavir and Alia’s Veera figure somewhere in the middle of their highway to nowhere. This absence of plan can both be a good thing or terrifying. Just depends on which side of the truth/perspective you wake up on. At first you fear everything and then you figure that only when there is no plan, can you lie on your back and feel the grass and the earth next to your skin, and touch wild flowers with your toes and hug a tree and dance in the middle of a road and connect with your kidnapper. Aah that bit.
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In a far more politically incorrect world, we had Meenakshi Sheshadri in Hero, not just singing Ding Dong with her kidnappers but falling in love with their leader, and even reforming him. We had Madhuri Dixit in Khalnayak mimicking Sridevi to entertain the goons who had kidnapped her. We had Rati Agnihotri (Coolie) and Amrita Singh (Mard) admiring the “mardangi” of the hero who manhandles them and picks them up and carries them off like they were bags of salt.
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Tere Naam elevated the kidnapper to the level of a modern day Majnu who will go to any length for love. It is a given in our cinema that women will cling to strong men no matter how abusive they are. There will be a point when the edges will soften and two conflicting forces will find a meeting point.
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And that is exactly the route that Highway takes. But then as Veera says, sometimes reality can be misleading and confusing and mixed up. So while her groom- to- be passively watches her getting kidnapped, it is her kidnapper who makes her feel safe. There is even a corny line, “Bin Phere Hum Tere” scribbled on the truck to perhaps show us something we have not yet accepted as possible. And we do take a long while to figure why Veera finds comfort in Mahavir when she should be running for her life. Also in the absence of a ‘plan’, the film recalls many Bollywood cliches. The house in the hills for instance underscoring the “phoolon ke shehar mein ho ghar apna,” fantasy. The It happened One Night and Dil Hai Ki Maanta Nahin switch of realities when a pampered young girl learns real life and learns to not just live it but to love the man who comes wrapped up with it. There is the Barfi element where two misfits go on a strange, unpredictable journey to discover themselves and each other. Then there is the Monsoon Wedding twist. Now this one makes you think a lot more than the entire film with its pretty montages of Himalayan peaks, churning rivers and the shifting colours and textures of the Indian landscape from Punjab to Kashmir to wherever there is an undiscovered expanse of green silence and nothingness.
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So Veera has been living with a secret. The back of the truck in which she is kidnapped has , “awaaz de do,” painted on it. Roughly translated as, “Give a shout out,” or in Veera’s case, “Give me a voice.” Because, as she says in one long, unbroken, cathartic monologue about a childhood violation, “On the surface everything must be proper..because no one wants to hear the truth. They go..shhhh..noone must know.” And that silence, or the conspiracy of silence is at the heart of every abuse within a home, in an office, in a film studio or elsewhere. And so say what you must about the Stockholm Syndrome but when a girl child is not safe in her home and is expected to hush her screams, how improbable will it be if she begins to like an alternate reality where fear is naked and does not come couched in the garb of a sweet-talking uncle with a chocolate? A reality where there is no pretence and she can say what is on her mind, be herself and for the first time in her life , see a man who is not a veneer?
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Well, just her luck that he is not a rapist and treats her with rough gentleness. Today, when a girl can be brutally raped in a bus in a crowded city and thrown off it to die, Veera travels with her kidnappers across the length and breadth of India like she was on a pleasure trip. Once you can swallow that, the ride becomes plausible.
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It all begins with her talking too much and wondering why she is no longer afraid of a man who has basically plucked her off from the life she once knew to what is beginning to feel liberating. There are some well-shot scenes to depict the shift. The urgent run across the night to somewhere that Veera realises is nowhere. The need to unburden herself to a man she knows will not shy away from the ugliness of what she is about to tell him. She is learning like many of us that sometimes life takes us on detours to make us confront our knots, our suppressed memories so that some day we can let go of them and heal. She sits on a rock in a frothing river and cries and laughs because nothing weighs her down any more.
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Alia Bhatt is precociously good in her silences and her monologues with a face that belongs to a child woman on her way to becoming someone with a lifetime of narratives behind her. Her eyes shimmer with pain and joy, her nostrils flare with palpable anger and her screams are soul deep. Randeep Hooda is smashing as Mahavir. He has very little to say throughout the film but he has a presence, something that goes beyond just his pitch perfect dialect and his nuanced body language down to that place of pain and fear and violence and hopelessness from where both crime and redemption spring. He has been in the shadows for too long. This should be his big moment. It is time. Especially after his big breakdown scene when he revisits his brutalised mother in his memory and sobs for her and himself and for the child he once was.
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Mahavir’s cronies are played by really good actors though the same can’t be said about Veera’s family. They are really stilted and awkward as they play act at being rich and insulated. The writing could have been better too because the film chugs along for long minutes without a word and then chucks big slices of confessional dialogue that at times begs for crisper lines.
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I personally don’t think this is Imtiaz Ali’s best film. Maybe it is his bravest film. Or maybe this is that one film where he has indulged his need to go on a journey without a plan. My lasting memory is Veera’s final hurrah, “You warned me about the predators outside but not within my own home. I was free when I was kidnapped and am in a jail now that am home.” At some level, the film seems to be saying that freedom does not come from being physically free to walk and eat and sleep but in letting go of the fears and conditioning that hold us back from saying what we want, from saying ‘No’ to violation and following our dreams to the mountain peaks we are too afraid to scale.
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There are moments that linger. Veera cradling a lamb, getting her hair braided by a woman who gives her what her own mother has not. Unconditional love. And Mahavir splashing water on his face to cleanse himself of his past before he can walk into a home where Veera is preparing a meal for him. Their bus ride.
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If nothing else, the film will make you want to get away from everything and revisit the small towns and the innocence you may have left behind. And take, maybe a roadtrip to nowhere with someone who too travels from one moment to another without a plan.
Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is a mother, an RJ , an artist. She runs Unboxed Writers from a rickety computer , edited Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, authored Perfect Eight and earns a lot of joy through her various roles and hopes that some day working for passion will pay in more ways than just one. And that one day she will finally be able to build a dream house, travel around the world and look back and say, “It was all worth it.”
