“Shareer nashwar hota hai. Atma ka kapda hota hai shareer,” Pramod, a crooked politician, declares in a discomforting sequence in Zee5’s Haddi. It’s an adage that could also apply to the practical relationship a cogent script is supposed to share with the performance it wears. A relationship that this wilful but tonal jumble of a film can’t quite consecrate as a tangible thing. Because Haddi is 40 minutes of a terrific, pitch-black noir haggling for relevance with an awkward feminist fable and a pulpy action thriller that probably had no business becoming the culmination of a story that could maybe have done more by doing less. Haddi boasts a spectacular cast, a stirring visual palette, and a central performance that though cumbrous at times, fascinates in places and yet, it seems blotched by the pressure of all that it can become as opposed to all that it already is.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui, plays Haddi, a transwoman who ends up in Noida on the run from a small UP town. Her first introduction to the audience is through two nonchalant murders. One comes out of left field, with little clue or context. The other one serves as the rite of passage for her to join Inder’s – a terrific Saurabh Sachdeva – gang of trans misfits who sell pleasure for money.
Haddi rises through Inder’s gang to eventually be noticed by his boss Pramod, played clichédly but also convincingly, by Anurag Kashyap. Pramod is your typical political goon privy to forceful means and sociopathic whims like listening to music on his noise-cancelling headphones while blood is spilled and sprayed all around him. “Mujhe daraya matt kar, main darr jaata hun,” he says a couple of times through the film. The meeting of these narrative threads, however, is more than mere coincidence because Haddi, it is gradually revealed, has more than aspirational woes to reconcile with Pramod, Inder and the rest.
The problem with this film directed by Akshat Ajay Sharma is that the shuffling of its narrative thread, its timeline-hopping stunts become tonal lumps in the throat of a story that could have used a clearer runway. A flashback, right after Haddi has been wounded by a bullet, transports you to another bloody episode from her life that though enrapturing in a sense, is undermined by just how chaotically it is tossed into the mix. It feels like two films messily glued together at the edges.
Then there are the countless subplots that though they intend to give the protagonist a complex inner life, a vivid bedding of misery and hope to fall back on, never quite earn the badge of sincerity.
Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub and Ila Arun are asked to essay interesting roles that could have used the pastels of a different kind of film. Here the focus is on mobsters, goons and their preoccupation with the kind of toxicity that Siddiqui routinely nourishes and negotiates with.
Siddiqui’s performance itself is a bit of an oddity. His gangster ways get in the way of the sobriety and tenderness that a character like Haddi could maybe have used. Instead, his trademark nonchalance and his wiry frame that comically endeavours to intimidate men twice his size overshadow and practically erode whatever softness and complexity the female form manufactures. In fact, the harder Siddiqui roars in a sari or the weepier he gets in a wedding dress, the more obnoxious and deprecating it feels. Not because it’s a bad performance in itself but because its abstractness is asked to hold hands with the boxed version of him we are familiar with. In a film that pits a transwoman against a deranged gang of trans men and women, all that potential for wildly inquisitive and maybe compassionate storytelling, is lost in the rush to enact violence for the sake of what Siddiqui’s cinematic history suggests and not what it could, despite it all, still achieve. Every time the film pauses to contemplate its own fragile world, uncork it from all that bottled up angst and violence, it becomes transfixing. Unfortunately, it’s also a world it can’t wait to tear down in painfully masculine ways.
Haddi can at times feel far too convoluted and mazy for its own good. Even its name, which it explains in the last leg of the film, feels like a suitable fulcrum for a completely different story. Here it appears as one of the many, many subplots that Siddiqui’s performance comes wrapped in. It has its moments, especially for the length that it is consigned to play out like a noir. But despite the spectacular casting, and an absorbing setup, the film wastes an ingenious premise in favour of orchestrating familiar gangster tropes that seek the man in a woman as opposed to the few times it, awkwardly, goes the other way. A farcical climax offers evidence that Haddi knows not how or where to drive the vehicle it has impressively, or maybe coincidentally, put together.
Haddi is now streaming on Zee5.
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