[DialOne]

With his new film Ishaqzaade, Habib Faisal takes a brave leap away from the aspirational middle class Delhi terrain he ploughed so expertly in Do Dooni Chaar (his directorial debut) and Band Baaja Baraat (which he wrote).

In Ishaqzaade, set in the fictional small town of Almore, the dreams that drive Faisal’s characters are no longer the little desires of little people: a new car, a bigger binness. What the Chauhans and the Qureishis are fighting over is Almore itself: a place whose location in the badlands of North India is announced as clearly by the swirling clouds of dust that rise from its roads as by the gunshots that casually punctuate every sentence – alongside the gaalis. The game might be grubby, but the stakes are high.

Qureishis. Among the grown-up children of the two families, each now plotting the political downfall of the other, are Parma and Zoya.
Faisal’s arresting opening scene – the children of both families pelting stones at each other going home from school – sets the tone of the very adult war to follow: epic, but also down-and-dirty. The film opens in the run-up to an election, in which the Chauhans are determined, by hook or by crook, to wrest power back from the currently-in-power Qureishis. Among the grown-up children of the two families, each now plotting the political downfall of the other, are Parma and Zoya.

The necessary outside of this patriarchal world of ghar-grihasthi is another kind of female presence: Chand, the local kothewali, a sinuous charmer with a soft spot for Parma. It’s easy to see what Habib Faisal is trying to do here, setting up the brothel as the one place where the bitter Hindu-Muslim feuds of the world outside have no purchase. It’s a cliched idea – the *****house as the place without prejudice, the great equaliser – but it might still have worked if it were written with more nuance, or given more meat by the sadly underwhelming Gauhar Khan. As it is, Faisal gives us a one-line depiction of the way women from these worlds eye each other with suspicion (“Hum dance waliyon ke munh nahi lagte,” says Zoya to Chand) – and then proceeds to break the barriers down with an ease that defies belief.

Ishaqzaade has many strengths. The locales – from crumbling railway sheds to a vast school chemistry lab – are nicely used without drawing attention to their own artistry. Faisal’s usually impeccable dialogue is occasionally overbaked, but it has undeniable grit: which recent Hindi film has had the courage to have a protagonist calling his lover a Musalli? Arjun Kapoor plays his combination of machismo and childish stupidity with exaggerated gestures that annoyed me rather than winning me over, but Faisal’s central characters are still more sharply realized than most directors can manage. And anyway, the film is worth watching just for Parineeti.

But ultimately, Ishaqzaade fails us. Not just because it gives us a climax that feels like a cop-out, even as it strains desperately to be epic. But because its final tragedy is triggered by Zoya’s still surviving faith – in herself, the world, and the lout she so inexplicably loves – while we who are watching can only wonder why she didn’t give up on all of it long ago